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Mac Mail / Apple Mail won't migrate to new iMac Catalina

Apple Mail worked just fine on my 2015 iMac after Catalina upgrade, but purchased a new Catalina 2020 iMac, migrated all my data through my time machine back up and now Apple mail won't migrate to new computer. I click on mail icon and it starts importing emails, then I get an error message every time (at least 10 attempts). Message shows import failed because of an error and I need to free up space on Home Folder. I have erased hardrive, and reinstalled Catalina multiple times. I need to access my old emails.



iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Sep 23, 2020 9:18 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 23, 2020 10:53 PM

Hey there! Sorry for the troubles.


Di you have a fusion drive? (You can see in Apple > About This Mac > System Report > Storage), it will show what type of drive it is.


This may not be the case, but I’ve seen this error on fusion drives, that requires they be rebuilt, due to possibly being reversed or corrupted some other way:


How to fix a split fusion drive:


https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584


In your case just running the Catalina command from recovery (diskutil resetFusion), then reinstalling, (As opposed to erasing from Disk Utility then reinstalling), should fix it.


If it’s not a fusion drive, or you’re getting errors in other apps and/or other users, there maybe something else going on, especially if you’ve already erased/reinstalled, perhaps if you migrated data from another Mac, the permissions got messed up. I just mentioned the fusion article from what I’ve seen and that particular error message, which is pretty specific and seems isolated to Mail, it seems like an extreme measure for such a small issue but I’ve seen it work, despite every other step being exhausted, and if you’ve already resorted to erasing and reinstalling, this might be worth a check, and hopefully saves you more time.


Hope that helps! Let me know how it goes!


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5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 23, 2020 10:53 PM in response to macjen24

Hey there! Sorry for the troubles.


Di you have a fusion drive? (You can see in Apple > About This Mac > System Report > Storage), it will show what type of drive it is.


This may not be the case, but I’ve seen this error on fusion drives, that requires they be rebuilt, due to possibly being reversed or corrupted some other way:


How to fix a split fusion drive:


https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584


In your case just running the Catalina command from recovery (diskutil resetFusion), then reinstalling, (As opposed to erasing from Disk Utility then reinstalling), should fix it.


If it’s not a fusion drive, or you’re getting errors in other apps and/or other users, there maybe something else going on, especially if you’ve already erased/reinstalled, perhaps if you migrated data from another Mac, the permissions got messed up. I just mentioned the fusion article from what I’ve seen and that particular error message, which is pretty specific and seems isolated to Mail, it seems like an extreme measure for such a small issue but I’ve seen it work, despite every other step being exhausted, and if you’ve already resorted to erasing and reinstalling, this might be worth a check, and hopefully saves you more time.


Hope that helps! Let me know how it goes!


Mac Mail / Apple Mail won't migrate to new iMac Catalina

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