“Import” folder in Mac Mail

[bw44]

When I upgraded from an old iMac running High Sierra to a new iMac running Sonoma, an “Import” folder (mailbox?) was either created or updated under “On My Mac” in Mail. I did the upgrade from a Time Machine backup, and Mail is working just fine for all accounts. But when I moved to the new machine, did the migration process move mail to the “Import” folder? What mail? The other mailboxes (folders?) in “On My Mac“ belong to my wife and I want move some of her other mailboxes there. (The reason has to do with the fact that we are closing a Google-managed (Telus.net) account and need to save messages from the closing Telus IMAP account.

Can I delete the Import mailbox or do messages in other mailboxes in On My Mac rely on the Import mailbox?

i’ve been trying to find a clear description of how messages and mailboxes are managed in “On My Mac” and how exactly they relate to the way IMAP servers work (though my understanding of the latter is pretty basic). There are some online discussions of similar problems, but they haven’t helped.

Can someone help me, or point to a good explanation of this?

Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

Have you looked through the "import" folder, to see what's in it?

Are there emails inside it that don't exist anywhere else?

If so, are those emails you want to save?

BE AWARE that the "on my Mac" area in Mail.app has "complete copies" of emails that are now stored on YOUR Mac's drive (hence the name), and not (in most cases) on any mail server (i.e., a location that IS NOT "your Mac").

Again, whether you want to keep them or not is up to you, but you'll have to look through them first to ascertain that.

If you want to keep them on the internal drive, you might consider creating another folder in the "on my Mac" area.
I'd name it "archives" (or something along that line).
Then, "manually move" emails you want to keep from the "import" folder into the "archives" folder.
The archives folder can even have sub-folders within, named whatever you want.

When this process is done...
If the number of archived emails is so large that you'd like to "clear it off" the internal drive, you might consider an external "archival" drive (could be for MORE THAN just emails).
Then, export the emails to the archival drive.

 

[bw44]

Have you looked through the "import" folder, to see what's in it?

Are there emails inside it that don't exist anywhere else?

If so, are those emails you want to save?

BE AWARE that the "on my Mac" area in Mail.app has "complete copies" of emails that are now stored on YOUR Mac's drive (hence the name), and not (in most cases) on any mail server (i.e., a location that IS NOT "your Mac").

Again, whether you want to keep them or not is up to you, but you'll have to look through them first to ascertain that.

If you want to keep them on the internal drive, you might consider creating another folder in the "on my Mac" area.
I'd name it "archives" (or something along that line).
Then, "manually move" emails you want to keep from the "import" folder into the "archives" folder.
The archives folder can even have sub-folders within, named whatever you want.

When this process is done...
If the number of archived emails is so large that you'd like to "clear it off" the internal drive, you might consider an external "archival" drive (could be for MORE THAN just emails).
Then, export the emails to the archival drive.

Thanks very much for taking the time to answer in detail. It helps a lot.

The Import mailbox (this is my wife's email account!) has over 4 thousand messages dating from 2013 to the day (April, 2014) that I migrated from the old iMac to the new one. It looks like the migration process copied All Mail (Archive?) to the Import mailbox under "On My Mac" on the new system. Could you or someone confirm this is what happens when you move Mail to a new computer? If so, then I assume they would be duplicates of what is still on the IMAP server (that haven't been deleted after the migration) for that account. Would this be right?

From what you said about "complete copies" does this mean that attachments are included when you move a mailbox from the IMAP server to "On My Mac"? The reason I'm so cautious is that we are going to close the server email account, but need to secure some messages with their attachments on the Mac. These messages are already in their own mailboxes, which I had planned to move to "On My Mac" before l closing the account.

If I export the important mailboxes to an external drive is importing them to a differnet account an option? (I've never imported/exported mailboxes before.)

Another question:

Have found discussions on the Apple forums about people having difficulty deleting the Import mailboxes after upgrading to new releases of MacOS, but none about upgrades to Sonoma. If I decide to delete the Import file
can I just delete it in the Mail app, or do I have to find it in the ~Library/Mail/V10 and delete it there?

If you can add anything to what you already posted I'd appreciate it. Thanks again

 

[Fishrrman]

Seems to me that (at least with IMAP), if you leave the msg "on the server", any attachments remain there, too.

If you move a msg with attachment(s) to a folder in the "on my Mac" area, the msg AND attachments will go into that folder. Then they get deleted from the server.

At least that's the way I think it works, I could be wrong.

I'd start browsing through those 4,000 emails to see if any "on your Mac" are still on the server, as well.

 

[bw44]

Seems to me that (at least with IMAP), if you leave the msg "on the server", any attachments remain there, too.

If you move a msg with attachment(s) to a folder in the "on my Mac" area, the msg AND attachments will go into that folder. Then they get deleted from the server.

At least that's the way I think it works, I could be wrong.

I'd start browsing through those 4,000 emails to see if any "on your Mac" are still on the server, as well.

I’ll try to figure out what the overlap is between the ones in Import on my Mac and those in mailboxes on the server. My guess, based on the size of the Import mbox and Archive (All Mail) on the server is that the latter was copied to Import when I did the migration. (Can’t believe migration would result in things being deleted from the IMAP Server!!) The Import mbox doesn’t have any sub folders though which is a nuisance.

Thanks again.