Partial migration and file sharing questions

Hi, all. I finally got a MacBook (thank you, Santa ) and am now thinking of either selling my iMac or having it as a secondary machine to act as a go between for an external hard drive on which my photos and digital scrapbooking supplies are stored. So, I want to move my mail settings, my browser favorites and all the info on the various ftp accounts I have in my ftp client for web development work I've done. I've already installed a fresh copy of Adobe CS3 and have downloaded Firefox, my ftp client and what other programs I need. I had very little stored on the iMac as I store almost everything on my external drive, but I do need those things I mentioned and am not sure how to get them.

Second question, I really want to leave my external drive hooked to the iMac or a PC that I may use just as a go between to the external drive if I sell the iMac. I do work with some pretty big files, though. Is that going to be really slow over a wireless network? Am I better off just moving around my external drive when I need stuff off of it? That sounds like a bad option to me as I have 2 six-year-olds who are prone to spills and the like, so I'd really like to do something else, but I don't want to have to sit and wait for minutes to open a large .psd file or something over the wireless network.

As always, any advice is appreciated!

 

Thanks for your response, Eric.

I have many folders and saved mails on the iMac that I want to move over. I have two gmail accounts and one other, all three of which could be IMAP, but I have had them set up as POP accounts. I already setup the accounts on here, but would like my folders, filters and saved mails moved over, too.

The ftp client is CuteFTP. I have not looked at it to see if I can export them from it, but I will look on the iMac and see.

I'm using Firefox and I know I can export those bookmarks, too. I had just hoped there was a way to get it all at once, rather than one program at a time.

The files are pretty varied, but I would say the majority of those I would want to open are between 2 & 5 MB each. On the rare occasion, though, that I actually do designing of product or print ads, they could be much larger.