Manually moving Mail from a Monterey system to a different Monterey system?

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Manually moving Mail from a Monterey system to a different Monterey system?

What am I doing wrong? I have a 2013 trash can Mac Pro that was running Mojave for the longest time. I recently upgraded everything to Big Sur, then Monterey in order have Apple Mail do what it needed to update all my mail on the source machine. I've now got a shiny new MacBook Pro M1 Max and I want to get the mail accounts from the 2013 Mac Pro Monterey to the 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max Monterey.

Just copying the files over doesn't seem to work. I've moved container folders, preferences, and mail folders in every configuration possible, but whenever I launch Apple Mail, it always shows up as a clean, no account, Apple Mail client.

I have several POP and IMAP accounts on the source machine, but nothing shows up in Apple Mail when I launch. What am I missing? Where does Mail store all the necessary files to do a manual move? Am I missing something, or is there an easier way to do this? I do NOT want to use Migration Assistant because I do NOT want to bring over any bad preferences or legacy issues from a source machine with over a decade of software issues.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Mac Pro, OS X 10.11

Posted on Nov 23, 2021 1:39 PM

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Answer 1

Craig Isbell Author

Level 1

12 points

Nov 23, 2021 5:35 PM in response to James Brickley

Yes, I'm aware of all this, but thanks. I've kept some accounts on POP because L've preferred keeping mail local so I don't get locked into a service and having to worry out external servers out of my control. I backup mail regularly into an SQL database, so it's not an issue. I've also been using email since 1993/94 so I'm pretty well versed in moving things over through the years. I just stopped upgrading the OS when Apple removed features from iTunes in Catalina that didn't get resolved until late versions of Big Sur. With the new laptop, I knew it was going to be a problem to move from three previous email generations so I just upgraded to Monterey, which was another nightmare entirely because of my situation, but I managed to get it all up and running. I figured it would probably be easier to go from like to like, but I guess I have to add the accounts, then bring them in. Seems like it's the only option. Thanks everyone. Appreciate the help.

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Answer 2

Craig Isbell Author

Level 1

12 points

Nov 28, 2021 5:45 PM in response to Craig Isbell

I can follow up with this and say, the solution to the problem was ultimately simple. It seems the only thing I was missing was to bring over the Accounts folder and the Mail folder in the user library folder. I already had the mail on the laptop when I was having all these issues. Once I brought over the accounts folder from the other Monterey Mac, as soon as I opened Apple Mail everything was there.

I had previously copied the Keychain folder as well, which resulted in a lot of user ID password typing, but I don't believe this was necessary to get what I needed. It's possible that might have needed to be migrated as well in order to bring all the login info over, but I can't guarantee this statement.

That being said, it appears to migrate email from one Apple Mac running Monterey to another Apple Mac running Monterey, you only need to copy the Mail, Accounts, and possible the Keychain folders. You will need to redo your mail preferences, but it's a small price to pay.

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Answer 3

Craig Isbell Author

Level 1

12 points

Jan 1, 2022 8:53 AM in response to nutmeg-green-sleeper

Unfortunately I was never able to find a suitable solution to the Mojave to Monterey issue. I think it was too far of a jump. Is it possible to upgrade your computer to a newer version of the OS, or is your MacBook OS version maxed out? In general, an OS upgrade is better at upgrading mail to the next version than a manual movement when possible. I had a technical issue that was preventing me.

For anyone interested, my issue was I had upgraded a 2013 Mac Pro to an OWC 2TB SSD that apparently didn’t update the firmware on the Mac during the upgrade, to truly recognize the drive. When I tried to update, the mac prevented me from doing so until I put the original 1TB SSD back into the Mac Pro, thus downgrading the computer so I could flash the computer firmware while upgrading the old one TB drive to Big Sur and then Monterey. (note to anyone purchasing upgrades and replacing original Apple hardware, never send back the original for credit because it might come back to bite you in the arse! Luckily I did not!)

That at least allowed me to get the mail into the Monterey format. After that it became an issue of moving mail from one Monterey system to another. Moving the mail was easy, a direct copy, but it took a little sleuthing to figure out copying accounts as well. Not sure if this helps you, but that’s at least the steps I had to go through to get my mail from Mojave into Monterey.

If you’re desperate to do something similar, and you can’t upgrade your OS like I did, I suppose you could try to find someone who has a newer unused MacBook (any newer “old” but upgradeable Mac model) which you could borrow to do a migration assistant to that device, so you can upgrade your mail and copy the files from Monterey to Monterey? Remember to delete your files from the temporary Mac. ;-)

Just some options for you. Good luck!

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Answer 4

Nov 23, 2021 2:14 PM in response to Craig Isbell

As to the accounts, you'll need to add those POP/IMAP accounts to Mail one at a time and set any individual configuration options and signatures, etc.

Copy the ~/Library/Mail folder from the old Mac Pro to the new M1 Max MBP somewhere like the Desktop and then in Mail go to File -> Import Mailboxes and point to the Mail folder you copied over from the older Mac Pro.

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Answer 5

Jan 1, 2022 7:53 AM in response to Craig Isbell

I'm now in a similar situation (old MacBook on Mojave, new MacBook on Monterey) but I have not upgraded my old MacBook from Mojave to Monterey and cannot upgrade for multiple reasons. I tried copying over the ~/Library/Mail, ~/Library/Accounts, and the keychains to the new MacBook but it appears Mojave Mail is at version 6 (based on the ~/Library/Mail/V6 folder name) but Monterey is at version 9. On the new MacBook, Mail does start up and states that it needs to update its database, then I get a "Your Mail index has been damaged. To repair it, quit Mail. Mail will repair the index the next time you open Mail. Your mailboxes will be preserved". I re-open Mail but there are no accounts or mailboxes - it's as if it's starting from scratch. The ~/Library/Mail/V6 folder DID get re-named to V9 and it does appear to still contain all the old mailboxes but Mail apparently can't rebuild the index.

I haven't found any other easy solutions to this issue (no, I cannot use Migration Assistant) so it looks like the only other option is to manually export all my mailboxes on the Mojave machine and re-import them on the Monterey machine, perhaps by following the process detailed here: Migrating Mail to a new Mac - Apple Community

If anyone has suggestions, let me know...

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Answer 6

Nov 23, 2021 2:25 PM in response to Craig Isbell

Easiest? Wipe the new Mac, and use Migration Assistant, and upgrade.

That’s far and away the easiest, and everything gets updated from old to new on the way across, as needed.

Though if you have also been making changes to both old and new in parallel, the migration will revert the new.

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Answer 7

Craig Isbell Author

Level 1

12 points

Nov 23, 2021 2:30 PM in response to James Brickley

Thank you. This sounds reasonable, but let me ask you for my own edification, in the older days of Mac OS, pre Catalina I believe, you could just copy folders and prefs over, open mail, it would to a couple updates and it was done, does Monterey no longer respond like this? You can no longer copy Monterey files over from one M to another and it will just open as normal?

I can understand if I was going from Mojave to Monterey, that probably wouldn't work, but I can't understand why Monterey to Monterey would be an issue, unless it's an underlying OS or Unix issue? Thanks.

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Answer 8

Nov 23, 2021 3:46 PM in response to Craig Isbell

Each operating system has made various changes to the mailbox formats on my ~/Library/Mail folder everything is in a V9 folder which appears to be a version number. When upgrading in the past, Mail would say it was upgrading the mailboxes when you first opened Mail. You should be able to import your mailboxes and add your accounts and be back in business. To copy over all the account info? Well I think the way the account info is handled varies between operating systems enough that it didn't work for you. So long as you can get the old email brought over and the accounts added back you can handle any Preference settings by hand.

In today's world, all my email is in the cloud on Gmail, iCloud and IMAP with my ISP. I stopped using POP a long time ago. So when I sign into those accounts all my email is there. I no longer archive email to On My Mac.

POP accounts empty the mailbox on the server and copy your email to your internal disk. POP is a poor choice when using multiple devices. There is an option to retain POP files on the server for a limited time period to help facilitate a poor mans sync but it doesn't mark items read, etc. It merely downloads an additional copy that is not sync'd. IMAP is where true sync between folders kept on the server and multiple devices became reality. Most every email provider offering POP will also offer IMAP so you should consider switching to IMAP instead of POP. The POP mailbox protocol is ridiculously old. I remember using it in the earliest days of the Internet before the World Wide Web even existed.

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Answer 9

Jan 5, 2022 1:42 PM in response to Craig Isbell

Thanks for the response. I ended up exporting each mailbox manually on the old Mac, then re-importing on the new Mac. The process went fairly well except that I discovered that 1 mailbox was apparently too large (lots of photo/video attachments) to export to the mbox format (max appeared to be about 2.15 GB). I broke that mailbox up into 4-5 mailboxes by date and exported that way but still had issues after importing those mailboxes - seems like some of the thread linkage and/or indexes got corrupted for many of the messages. I'm ignoring the problem for now as this mailbox was mostly used as an archive and isn't something I normally reference. I'm now using Mail on the new MacBook Pro without any other issues.

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