[Macworld.com]

Mail 2.x’s exported .mbox files won’t import? You need to read the fine print. [more]

[Grapho]

That is goofy, but it's good to know.

[Chris Breen]

Yeah, it's confused a number of people. The Apple Discussion Forums have a few threads that question what Mail's doing in this regard.

[mattc]

Alas, this doesn't with .mac and other imap accounts in which the mail is stored on a server and not on your Mac. If you drag a .mac mailbox to the desktop, you get an INBOX.imapmbox folder (instead of INBOX.mbox) and importing the folder into Mail results in the same "no valid mail ..." message.

[DarkDog]

Quote:

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Alas, this doesn't with .mac and other imap accounts in which the mail is stored on a server and not on your Mac. If you drag a .mac mailbox to the desktop, you get an INBOX.imapmbox folder (instead of INBOX.mbox) and importing the folder into Mail results in the same "no valid mail ..." message.

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Just rename the copied .imapmbox folder to .mbox and it will be fine.

[supergper]

Quote:

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Alas, this doesn't with .mac and other imap accounts in which the mail is stored on a server and not on your Mac. If you drag a .mac mailbox to the desktop, you get an INBOX.imapmbox folder (instead of INBOX.mbox) and importing the folder into Mail results in the same "no valid mail ..." message.

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I really hope you aren't serious??? If your mail is stored on a server, why would it matter if you can't import it back in? That's the beauty of IMAP, setup your new mail client and you'll automatically have all you mail messages downloaded from the server they are stored on.

[crocogator]

 Chris Breen, on 26 February 2007 - 01:11 PM, said:

Yeah, it's confused a number of people. The Apple Discussion Forums have a few threads that question what Mail's doing in this regard.

Hello
To prepare a selected time interval of email for transfer from Mail 2.1.3 on my very old G4, I created a new mailbox then dragged the selected messages into that mailbox. I copied that mailbox from User/name/Library/Mail/... onto an external drive. I then tried to use the import function in Mail 4.3 on my "new" MacPro to incorporate them, but got the same error message discussed in this thread.

The structure of the data copied is
FOLDER "mailboxname.mbox"
that folder contains
FILE "info.plist"
and FOLDER "Messages"
that folder contains the indiviudal emails as .emlx files


When I found this thread today I put the data described above into another folder as discussed, but trying again to import yielded the same error message.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance
Tom

[Bryansix]

Can we stop calling it goofy and just call it what it is; poorly designed? Note in Lion, it remains just as poorly designed but in a different way. There is now an option to import .mbox files but that doesn't work with .mbox files from Apple Mail. Instead you have to choose the top option to import from Apple Mail and this time you have to select the .mbox file itself. Yep, bad design.

[benfr]

Ok, so I imported the folder with the mailboxes from another mac. Now I have the import folder in my mail box list. How do I get rid of the import folder without deleting all the mail boxes?