schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

The procedure for importing a MacOS X Mail mailbox into Mail is not as obvious as you might expect. I'm posting this entry to spare others the frustration I went through.

I have what must be a common scenario: I normally use an iMac, but was on the road for a week, so took my old iBook so I could use Mail. Now, having collected the messages I want to save to a mail folder/mailbox, I want to move that mailbox (NewMsgs.mbox) over to the iMac. Surprisingly, just copying the ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/NewMsgs.mbox folder from iBook to iMac, and restarting Mail, doesn't work: I get an empty NewMsgs mailbox there.

Next I try the File:Import Mailboxes:Import data from:Mail for Mac OS X menu selection, which provides the following dialog: .

Here's the rub: selecting a mailbox folder results in a No valid Mail for Mac OS X files were found error message. You must select a folder (any folder, located anywhere) containing the desired mailbox folder (yes, the dialog does say this). The error message is beside the point, even misleading: there are valid Mail for Mac OS X files in the mailbox folder, but Mail won't find them unless it starts looking from a parent folder.