Adding recovered emails to new Mail installation?

[wendy]

My 2008 17" MBP was a recent victim of the failed nVidia chip. My circumstances at the time meant I had no option but to buy a new Mac straight away, whether or not Apple would agree to replacement (which they didn't, but that's another story ...)

I've been running the new machine a few weeks and have now got my recovered data back from the old machine. The old machine was running Snow Leopard and I'm now on Mountain Lion. I would like to be able to pull my recovered emails back into Mail. I notice that the new version of Mail uses a different folder structure for emails, so I assume copying across the plist and Mail Library wouldn't work, even should I want to do that. Which I don't because I now have a month's worth of emails which I don't want to lose either.

Is there any way of adding the old emails to my new mailboxes and having Mail recognise that they're there?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

-Did you use the Migration Assistant or Time Machine to recover/transfer your old data?
-If not, how did you transfer it?
-Is this the same Mac from your other post that is running El Capitan now?

C

 

[wendy]

Neither. Data was simply copied from the recovered hard drive to the new machine. Apps I reinstalled. I was never able to resolve this Mail issue, so I settled for just accessing the old Mail data on the recovered hard drive as I needed it ... until the cat flipped it off my desk in a late dinner protest.

Yes this is the same MBP which I've now upgraded to El Capitan.

 

[Cory Cooper]

A simple copy of data isn't recommended, as it doesn't copy all the related files/folders in other locations on your drive.

Maybe you can use the Import feature in Mail to import the email from the recovered hard drive.

C

 

[wendy]

The data I copied across was just simple data - images, documents, etc - with no related files/folders in other locations. Nothing can be done with the recovered hard drive now thanks to the cat. He broke it.

 

[Cory Cooper]

-So you don't have access to the old hard drive now, correct?
-Did you move the ~/Library/Mail folder to your current user folder? If not, where would try to recover the old emails from?

C

 

[wendy]

No. Hard drive is fecked.

Nothing was moved across to the new system apart from my data. I didn't copy the Mail Library over because I had already had to create a new one on the new machine from the moment I started using it. The recovery of the original machine's data didn't happen for quite some time after that. Obviously I didn't want to overwrite newer data, so I just left it where it was and looked it up when I needed to.

This was 4 years ago now. It's not a problem any more.

 

[Cory Cooper]

As I understand the situation then, there isn't any mail to recover and add to your current mail setup. And, I just noticed that your original post in this thread is from 2012, so I apologize for not seeing that and wasting our time troubleshooting this.

C

 

[wendy]

LOL! No worries! It was nice to finally get a response! But no, this is no longer an issue. Just the System Preferences problem after the el Capitan upgrade.

 

[Cory Cooper]

I apologize that we never got back to you about this. Hopefully, we can resolve your other issue.

C