I have my mail set up on my snow leopard macbook but want to put all the data on my new lion air but don;t want to use the migrate feature. Can anyone tell me (an idiots guide) way to do this i.e basically the same mail accounts and stored emails as I currently have on my old system.
thanks
I usually migrate, but the last time I did a Time Machine restore, my mail.app folders got corrupted. So before I begin, I need to know if you have all your email sitting on a server or is it only on your Mac? If you have email sitting on a server, it's very simple to set up the same accounts on a new machine and all the email just "shows up" on the new machine. But if the only copy you have is in mail.app, migrating to another machine is a bit more tedious.
For now, I'm going to assume you have your email on a server, ie gmail.
Step 1 is to run keychain access on your old machine to get the passwords of all your email accounts (if you don't know them). Write them down so you can enter them on your new machine.
Step 2 is to open mail.app on your new Mac and enter the accounts 1 by 1, using the passwords you looked up in step 1. Make sure you pick IMAP for your email so messages get copied to your Mac but not deleted from the server. POP3 is an old sloppy method of getting email and you should avoid using it even if it means finding a new email provider that supports IMAP.
That's it. Two steps. Done.
Now I'm going to assume you have your only copy of a lot of your email sitting in Mail.app on your old Mac. First you do steps 1 and 2 above. Then you begin with step 3 here...
Step 3. On your old Mac, in mail.app choose mailbox->export mailbox. You can then create a folder to export your mailbox.
Step 4. Copy the folder to your new Mac and import the mailbox to mail.app.
Steps 3 and 4 can be time consuming which is why I always use IMAP and I never delete messages from the server. This was especially handy when a failed TM restore left me with mail.app crashing whenever I tried to launch it. I finally went to ~/Library/Mail and deleted all of mail.app's folders which was about 9 gig of stuff. I then set up my email accounts from scratch and walked away. I came back in less than an hour I had all my email re-downloaded from the servers.
Hope this helps...