[Macpartners] mail.app migration

[Albert Willis]

On Dec 4, 2006, at 12:35 PM, Scott R Ehrlich wrote:

> I backed up a 10.3.9 system to an external firewire drive.    I put  
> a newer 10.4
> machine in place of the older one, and connected the external drive  
> to the new
> system.
>
> The user has about 20000 messages in their inbox.   The older mail.app
> apparently cached or otherwise knew about all the messages, but  
> only displays
> about 140.  The newer mail.app from 10.4 insists on downloading all  
> messages
> from the POP3 account.
>
> I tried to copy the old inbox files to Mail's location under <user>  
> -> Library.
>
> Upon calling up mail.app after doing so, it showed the same 140  
> messages, but
> when I elected to get mail, it still retrieved all 20000 messages.
>
> I figure there is a cached or prefs file somewhere that I'm  
> missing.   It would
> be really nice to have the prefs file in place, and have 10.4's  
> mail.app do a
> diff between the messages it knows and newer ones, and not have to  
> download all
> 20000 message again.
>
> Is that possible?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Scott

The short answer here is to use Migration Assistant to move all of  
the data (including all of the email) and accounts from the old  
machine to the new one.

I suspect that regardless of the method used to get the old email on  
the new 10.4 machine, the first time you launch Mail, especially  
since there email format is different between 10.3 and 10.4, Mail is  
going to rebuild caches, including the inbox. Remember, Mail caches  
everything in the inbox and the first time is going to take a while.  
After it's done, it will only cache the changes. You may need to  
click the "Get Mail" button several times, due to a bug that causes  
Mail to forget to to finish a long operation--like caching 20000  
messages. We're working with Apple on this problem.

There should be no "POP3" account to download from, since you'd be  
configured for IMAP. As long as Mail is properly configured for IMAP-- 
either by using Migration Assistant or by manual configuration-- 
everything should just work.

   -- Al



______________________________
Albert Willis
Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
Client Support Services
Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
awillis at mit.edu


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