Clean Install of El Capitan GM - Can't Import/Transfer Mailbox

Question

I'd installed the Beta El Capitan inline, which imported everything from my Yosemite system on my MBP, and everything, including Mail, worked fine. However, I wanted to do a clean install with the GM release. So I manually copied my User folder from my El Capitan Beta installation to an external HDD, and then did a clean install with El Capitan GM. Mail works fine with all IMAP folder configurations, (once I manually added the email accounts). However, there was one archive MBOX hierarchy, (called Work which has multiple sub-folders), which was stored "On My Mac", which I wanted to move over, and I mistakenly thought a simple copy process could move it.

I first tried to copy this Work MBOX hierarchy, (18G, about 90k emails), from my backup ~/Library/Mail/V3/Mailboxes folder, to a manually created ~/Library/Mail/V3/Mailboxes folder, and after starting Mail, it doesn't show any folders as being "On My Mac". After reversing those changes, I tried copying the entire ~/Library/Mail/V3/Mailboxes folder from my backup to the new system, and still, Mail doesn't show any folders being "On My Mac". Finally, after reversing those changes, I tried copying the entire ~/Library/Mail and ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail from my backup to my new system, and again, Mail won't show any folders being "On My Mac".

I even created some new mailboxes, which do show up as being "On My Mac" on my system, to try to find where these folders are created, and all I could determine is that Mail isn't creating a ~/Library/Mail/V3/Mailboxes folder for them. Lastly, I tried importing the mailbox from within Mail, and the exact same thing that happened to this user posting to the Apple Communities forum regarding Mail on OSX 10.10, happended to me. After selecting import mailbox, and then selecting Apple mail format, and the Work MBOX top level container, the import process comes back within a few seconds, and says that the new folder is in the folder called Imported, but nothing has been done, and there is no Imported folder.

Is there no way to manually add an Apple Mail MBOX folder hierachy to an already running Apple Mail system? I know I've done it before with earlier versions.

Worst case, I don't mind doing a complete Mail wipe and manual copy from backup, because I don't actually need anything Mail related on my new installation. So if there was some brute force way to copy over the entire Mail configuration from my prior El Capitan system, to this new clean install, it would at least get me my "On My Mac" folder archive back.

Thanks for any guidance..

Beta
macOS

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Posted by

jasn

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Answer 1

So even though this couldn't be solved simply, my fallback solution worked. I had previously used Emailchemy for these kinds of email conversions when moving from Linux to Mac OSX, and using the tool again, allowed me to get this archived Work MBOX hierarchy of 90k emails, into my system's Mail infrastructure.

Using Emailchemy v12.1.16, I converted my prior Apple Mail MBOX hierarchy, from Apple Mail input to Apple Mail output, which then allowed Mail to properly import the converted mailbox hierarchy. I guess the lesson here is when planning a clean install, make sure to do a Time Machine backup, just in case you need to use something like the Migration Assistant.

Jason

Posted by

jasn

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Answer 2

Manually copying/moving locally stored mailboxes to a new OS is inevitably a messy and imperfect business - there are more than 10 threads on the subject here on this OS X 10.11 forum and none of them conclude with 100% success. The complexity of the situation is compounded by the transition from the V2 system to the more system-integrated V3 system.

Migration Assistant is the best way to do this sort of thing - with it you can export just your user account (i.e. including mail, docs, etc. but not apps or system preferences) to a file on an external hard drive and then use Migration Assistant on the newly installed OS X to import it back, mail and all. It's the closest thing to a clean install while preserving things like locally stored mail.

-Max

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 3

Thanks for your reply Max.

In fact one of the threads I read was one where you responded with a method for manually copying the MBOX files, which added the step of making sure the privs were set correctly. I will try that later and see if that solves my problem.

My larger issue is that this is obviously not something related to just 10.11, but was at least an issue in Yosemite. I simply had an OSX system running with a good Mail configuration. I did a clean install with effectively the same version of the OS, and I wanted to manually configure everything in order to make sure all of the cruft is cleaned out. Which is why I don't use Migration Assistant, or Time Machine backups, etc. Perhaps someone needs to fix the Mail program's Import Mailbox capability to handle this better.

I figure it should be straight forward to manually copy the "On My Mac" mailboxes from the old system to the new, but it doesn't work. I know I've done this with an earlier OSX transition several years ago, so something's definitely changed. BTW, the Mailboxes folder in my prior configuration was in the V3 folder, so any V2 to V3 conversion done by the OSX Mail program, had been settled. Frustrating.

If anyone knows of a specific plist which controls what Mail sees as Mailboxes stored "On My Mac", feel free to point it out. Perhaps solving this is as simple as editing that file after manually copying the MBOX files. I've tried grepping through some of them, with no success. At this point I'm stumbling around with something that shouldn't be this hard.

Jason

Posted by

jasn

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Answer 4

So even though this couldn't be solved simply, my fallback solution worked. I had previously used Emailchemy for these kinds of email conversions when moving from Linux to Mac OSX, and using the tool again, allowed me to get this archived Work MBOX hierarchy of 90k emails, into my system's Mail infrastructure.

Using Emailchemy v12.1.16, I converted my prior Apple Mail MBOX hierarchy, from Apple Mail input to Apple Mail output, which then allowed Mail to properly import the converted mailbox hierarchy. I guess the lesson here is when planning a clean install, make sure to do a Time Machine backup, just in case you need to use something like the Migration Assistant.

Jason

Posted by

jasn

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Answer 5

Good to know - pity that a 3rd party app is required to accomplish a task that, as you said yourself, should be possible natively. That it costs $30 doesn't help matters, but I'll keep it in mind as a suggestion.

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 6

After installing the latest (and the first for me) beta 10.11, all the mails from my POP mailboxes completely vanished from my system. Apparently the conversion from V2 to V3 wouldn't take any of those. Most of the messages in my Mailboxes (On my Mac) were also ignored. 100k+ mails completely gone.

I managed to recover the mails by restoring the last version of V2 from Time Machine and replaced all the folders (Mailboxes, MailData and all POP-something) under V3 with those just retrieved. When I launched Mail it first imported the mailboxes, but after that all seems fine with all missing emails back where they were supposed to be. I haven't found a problem this far, but will post again if anything else found.

Posted by

joarial

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Answer 7

Thanks for posting your experience - it sounds encouraging 🙂

Posted by

Max108

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Answer 8

Had the same issue, this actually worked for me:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH11704?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Transferred everything, removed the Enveloppe-* files, and voilà!

Posted by

berengerzyla

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Clean Install of El Capitan GM - Can't Import/Transfer Mailbox

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