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I used Migration Assistant to initialize a new MacBook Air. I'm having problems with my Keychain, but I asked about that in a different thread. This question is about Mail. I have no idea if the problems are related.
When I start Mail up, I get a notice that my messages must be imported. It starts importing, then stops with an error message after importing about 1,000 of 8,000 messages. The error simply says, "Import Failed."
MacBook Air
This happened to me last night when my wife's MacBook Air failed, and I restored her user via Migration Assistant to my MacBook Pro running Catalina. I tried a few times and would get the same error, though each time I got a few more hundred messages along, the target number kept increasing as well.
After a few hours of sleep, I went to this folder in my home folder:
~/Library/Mail
[You can highlight this path of the folder and control click (depending upon how you have your computer set up, this is a right click, or a secondary click) on it, go to Services in the contextual menu, down to Show in Finder to quickly access this folder]
I moved her Mail folder to a safe place- I choose my Downloads folder rather than her Desktop as the Desktop folder is in my iCloud and I didn't really need to upload it to iCloud.
After moving the Mail folder I opened Mail.app and it worked as one would expect Mail to work in this circumstance- it showed the normal Mail app organization and her emails downloading from the servers.
Obviously this only retrieves email that is on the servers. If you had emails in On my Mac local folder, you'd have to go back and try to import specific folders that were in the Mail folder that you moved out of ~/Library. That's beyond my recent experience and I'm sorry i can't be of more help in that situation- I quit moving email to local "On my Mac" more than a decade ago when i set up a new computer and found that those emails did not restore from the server as I'd wanted them to because I'd moved them off the server! As far as we can tell she did get all her email back in all currently logged in accounts. All locally stored email from her previous setup is still in the Downloads folder I previously mentioned in case we ever do need to go through it.
I do hope this is helpful, I know I was quite bummed when I kept getting that Import Failed error very early this morning while setting up the "new" computer for my wife so she'd have it for work when she got up this morning. I found your thread when looking to see what i might be able to do to fix it.
This happened to me last night when my wife's MacBook Air failed, and I restored her user via Migration Assistant to my MacBook Pro running Catalina. I tried a few times and would get the same error, though each time I got a few more hundred messages along, the target number kept increasing as well.
After a few hours of sleep, I went to this folder in my home folder:
~/Library/Mail
[You can highlight this path of the folder and control click (depending upon how you have your computer set up, this is a right click, or a secondary click) on it, go to Services in the contextual menu, down to Show in Finder to quickly access this folder]
I moved her Mail folder to a safe place- I choose my Downloads folder rather than her Desktop as the Desktop folder is in my iCloud and I didn't really need to upload it to iCloud.
After moving the Mail folder I opened Mail.app and it worked as one would expect Mail to work in this circumstance- it showed the normal Mail app organization and her emails downloading from the servers.
Obviously this only retrieves email that is on the servers. If you had emails in On my Mac local folder, you'd have to go back and try to import specific folders that were in the Mail folder that you moved out of ~/Library. That's beyond my recent experience and I'm sorry i can't be of more help in that situation- I quit moving email to local "On my Mac" more than a decade ago when i set up a new computer and found that those emails did not restore from the server as I'd wanted them to because I'd moved them off the server! As far as we can tell she did get all her email back in all currently logged in accounts. All locally stored email from her previous setup is still in the Downloads folder I previously mentioned in case we ever do need to go through it.
I do hope this is helpful, I know I was quite bummed when I kept getting that Import Failed error very early this morning while setting up the "new" computer for my wife so she'd have it for work when she got up this morning. I found your thread when looking to see what i might be able to do to fix it.
Joel -- thanks for taking the time to reply.
My problems with Mail were just one of several. I decided to try a clean install of everything (Catalina plus a from-scratch Time Machine) and all is good now. I don't know what was corrupted, but I'm going to guess that initializing from Time Machine was the problem.
I've tried starting Mail up several times to no avail. However, the number of messages to import keeps going up. It's now up over 11,000.
Can't use Mail after migration to new MacBook Air