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Why won't Mail import my mailboxes from... Mail?

CubeHacker

CubeHacker

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 22, 2003
1,245
257
I exported my mailboxes from mail in Panther before selling my computer. Now i'm trying to import them into mail in Tiger. Mail sees the folders, but when I import, none of my mail shows up - the import folders are empty. I know my mail is THERE since the export folder is nearly 40mb. This seems pretty ridiculous to me considering that its an import/export from the same app!
 
Ok i've gotten closer, but still not quite there yet. Instead of using the import function, I simply copied my old mail folder from the library folder to the new one. Mail APPEARED to be importing some 400+ mails, but when mail finally opens, only like 20 show up...

EDIT: OK, even more weird. When I click on one of my "imported" emails, i get this message:

"The message from <my email> concerning “<email subject>” has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it."

Uhhh..?
 
mad jew said:
So is it an IMAP or POP3 account? If it's IMAP, then you should be able to simply resync with the online server. :)
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter which one it is, those emails have been deleted off the server for years now. Thus, that is the entire point of having it exported to save as a file.
 
Yeah good point, but Mail has been known to work extremely slowly with IMAP accounts (.Mac or otherwise), so there's a chance it worked the first time but it was still thinking. Mail 2.0 (Tiger) handles the emails differently to Mail 1.0 (Panther) which is why simply replacing folders in your Mail folder didn't work. :(

I don't know if you did this, but I had much more luck importing individual folders into Mail rather than trying to import them all at once.

I agree though in that the compatibility between the two versions of Mail is not good enough. :(
 
If I import them, all my folders appear empty. If I delete every single file in the /library/mail directory and then copy over my old Mail data, then start up Mail, it will recognize the old data and say that it will prepare to import the old version of mail - it shows 400+ mails being imported along with a progress bar, but then most of my mail is gone. I don't understand it
 
mad jew said:
The second bit makes sense. The two versions of Mail use different filing formats.

However, are you importing the folders individually? :)
Click to expand...

If thats true, then why is all my exported sent mail showing up? Only the inbox appears to have this issue with none of my mail appearing. Unfortunately thats where all the important stuff is.
 
DOACleric said:
If I import them, all my folders appear empty. If I delete every single file in the /library/mail directory and then copy over my old Mail data, then start up Mail, it will recognize the old data and say that it will prepare to import the old version of mail - it shows 400+ mails being imported along with a progress bar, but then most of my mail is gone. I don't understand it
Click to expand...

If all 400+ e-mails are in your inbox, instead of in sub-folders, this may be the source of the problem. I recently upgraded from Panther to Tiger, and a couple of my largest mail folders started getting the same weird message as yours. It seemes like Tiger Mail has more problems dealing with big mail folders than Panther Mail did.

I resolved the problem by keeping the old Mail folder on an external drive, using the import feature to bring folders into Tiger Mail one by one, and then IMMEDIATELY moving the imported messages from the 'import' folder into new sub-folders -- that way Tiger Mail didn't choke on the big folders any more. That seemed to resolve the issue. Hopefully you can do something similar?
 
Try this program .
There is some kind of compatibility issue with Mail files when going from Tiger to Panther or vice versa.

Edit: This app will only work for converting Tiger mail files to Panther mail, sorry...
 
I had this same problem. Try selecting 'other' rather than 'mail for mac os x'. I know it's ridiculous, but it worked for me.

-Tim
 
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