Transfering old email messages to new mac

[moe5443]

Hi everyone,

So right now I'm in the process of replacing my current 24" iMac with a new 27" i7 iMac. I'm trying to get everything ready to move all my old files over to the new one.

The problem I'm having is I just sold my current iMac online and I need to format it and get it to its new owner before I will have my new iMac. Which I wont have until next week. So I dont think i can use the migration assistant, right? I'm thinking I just need to move everything over to an external harddrive.

I've moved all of my itunes files onto it and all my photos. But I'm not sure how to get things like all my email messages that are on this computer on there. I would like to have all my email messages on my new iMac. Can anyone help me accomplish this and let me know anything else I would have to do or know during this transition?

 

[FourCandles]

Assuming your external drive is at least as large as your iMac drive, then you can make a backup using Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner, and then use Migration assistant on the new machine to bring everything back off the external.

 

[Quint]

The way I have done this numerous times is to get an external hard drive (firewire will give you the most options) that is bigger than your current hard drive. Create a second partition that is 25 - 30 GBs. Connect the drive to your computer and install Mac OS on this small partition. You can use the system disks from your iMac and deselect all options in Customize area.

Boot from this partition and use disk utility to restore your internal drive to the large partition. (If you check the erase this drive option, it will go much faster).

You will now have an exact duplicate of your old hard drive. You can connect this to the new iMac and use the Migration Utility or drag and drop files into your new user account (I prefer this method).

Alternatively, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and avoid a few steps.

Your mail files (if you are using Apple Mail) are located in the /Users/(you)/Library/Mail folder
You can copy this entire folder to the new computer in the same location. Also copy /Users/(you)/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to the same location on the new computer.

If you are using Microsoft Entourge, copy the entire Microsoft User Data folder from your Documents folder into the new Documents folder.