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Just fired up my new Mac Studio. Coming from a Mac Pro running Sierra. Found a thing online that said all I need to do move my Mail is copy Mail folder from home/Library, preference file from home/Library/Preferences, and my Keychain file (also from home/Library). Did that. Fired up Mail on the new Studio, and it's looking like it wants to create a new account instead of opening the stuff I just copied in.
I didn't use Migration Assistant because I wanted to start with a fresh slate. I've got stuff in my Applications folder on the Mac Pro dating back to 2005, so I looked at everything and figured I would either reinstall anything I really need (not much), and buy new versions of anything else.
But back to Mail, what might I have done wrong?
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I don't know what you did wrong specifically, but I do know (or at least I think) you can use Migration Assistant and drill down and select to only migrate email.
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If someone else can confirm this, I would do that. I have a CCC backup of my Sierra startup disk.
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Can't say what went wrong. It works when I do it. Tho I prefer to do a clean setup on a new Mac.
...The best way to migrate email is to not migrate it at all. Just use the Internet Accounts settings, put your IMAP/Exchange email credentials in and voila. It all syncs.
If you have "on my Mac" email, you can export the "on my Mac" mailboxes as mboxes from the old Apple Mail app and then import them into the new Mail app.
Do it this way and you end up with nice new clean Mail databases.
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Unfortunately, it's not IMAP, it's POP.
Looks like at some point, I imported other old email accounts into Mail, since I have 4 other "On My Mac" imports. I guess I can do what you were saying and export my two Inboxes and just start new. But it would be great if I can just migrate my stuff.
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Just read an Apple support article saying you can't use Migration Assistant to just migrate Mail. So I'll probably just do the export/import thing.
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rz,
Who is your email provider? Most support POP and IMAP. Maybe it's time to switch to IMAP and not worry about situations like this. Consider using an email archiving package to archive your existing mail, make the switch to IMAP on the new machine and start fresh with a new hierarchy, etc.
Robert
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My email is "roadrunner", which is now Spectrum. Not sure they allow IMAP.
Ok, so I decided to just enter my info and create "new" versions of my two accounts. Well, it obviously saw what I had copied in, because it created an "Import" folder with ALL my inboxes and imports, all jumbled together. Not a big deal because I just want the emails, I don't really care if they're sorted. I think the only thing it didn't carry over was my sent emails. I'll probably just import them over.
