Importing mail account settings, adding multiple e-mail address to mail rules in Mail

[infobleep]

Hi there

Is there away to import mail account settings from Thunderbird and/or Outlook Express into Mail? [that is mail.app, to help any one searching later on as Mail is too common a word to search for].

I've imported all my messages correctly but don't know how or if it's possible to import my account settings.

Also:

I'm in the process of migrating all my e-mails / mail accounts / settings and mail rules from Outlook Express to Mail [Mail.app]. I have successfully got all my e-mails across. I have also managed to convert all the e-mail addresses in the 50+ mail rules, as stored in the Windows registry, from hex into text.

Some of my rules have tens of e-mail addresses which if I had to add in each address separately would be a nightmare. Is there away of block adding in e-mail addresses to Mail? Also is it possible to manually edit the mail rules preference file(s) and insert the e-mail addresses into that? I'm aware I have to manually recreate the rules themselves but that's not so difficult. It's the adding back in of all the e-mail addresses that might be, given the large number that exist.

Regards

Infobleep

 

[robbieduncan]

The rules are in ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist. It's a plist file which is, on my system at least, plain text xml rather than binary. You could edit it directly but as each rule has an ID that looks like a UUID I'd really not recommend it: it'll probably not work.

 

[infobleep]

robbieduncan thank you for your reply. That is most helpful.

Given that is the case, it is possible to add in multiple e-mail addresses into a mail rule in one go?

Regards

Infobleep

 

[robbieduncan]

I have no idea. You could try but I doubt it would work. You could create the rules with single mail addresses and then close mail and edit the file as the UUIDs would then be in place. But the email addresses would have to be in the correct format to just copy into place: surrounded by the appropriate XML tags already.

Edit to add: or perhaps not. The individual criteria have UUIDs as well. They are an array of items like this:

                        <key>Criteria</key>
                        <array>
                                <dict>
                                        <key>CriterionUniqueId</key>
                                        <string>1be74208-f081-44bd-8cfc-f9ce31e542b4</string>
                                        <key>Expression</key>
                                        <string>tvcables.co.uk</string>
                                        <key>Header</key>
                                        <string>From</string>
                                </dict>
                        </array>

I don't think there is any way you can safely create these without using the editor in Mail. Of course you may be able to use AppleScript to create rules and automate this that way: I've never looked into AppleScripting Mail so you'll have to look into that yourself.