Mail account to another machine

My work situation has just changed and I have moved from working in an office to working at home. This is due to the company I serviced closing down as the directors have retired. They have graciously passed their business onto me.

One of the stipulations of this is that they will maintain their email servers and address for one month. After that, I'm having to revert to using my own, so I have that month to migrate my new clients across to using it.

My home setup initially consisted of my main machine being an iMac running 10.5. On that machine, I have two 'home' email accounts - my regular account and a small business account I run alongside. Both are handled through VirginMedia here in the UK.

I have now inherited a 2nd, identical iMac, also running 10.5 (lucky me!). On the strength of this, my Wife has now inherited my 1st Mac (lucky her!).

On the 2nd iMac resides my current work email account, being hosted by another company. As already mentioned, I need to keep it active on this Mac for at least a month. I ALSO need to have my home email account active as well to 'welcome' my newly transferred clients.

Also as well, my wife needs to have the same home email account active on HER machine as there will be an initial crossover between private and work emails until I get the relevant Smart Mailboxes set up for her.

When I try to set up the home account on the 2nd Mac, I get the message that the account is already active. I have screen sharing on and using this to see the screen of Mac 1, I am slavishly copying its Mail preference settings to Mac 2. No dice.

Surely this should be something fairly easy to do, looking at a scenario where I might have an office machine AND a laptop needing direct access to a single account. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

 

The company are closing down completely. They don't want the domain name to exist any more, hence my complete migration from their systems. When I say 'the company', what I actually mean is 'their client-base', so the need to transfer across to my personal domain is necessary so as to keep things running through my business as it stands at the moment.