How can I move all my emails and mailboxes from my Powerbook 10.4 to a new MacBook Pro running Lion?

Question

I have an older PowerBook (OS X 10.4.x) and I need to move all my Mail (including mail I archived to folders) to a new Macbook Pro running Lion. 
Can I just move the Mail directory (/Home/Library/Mail) and com.apple.mail.plist from the Powerbook to the MBP? 
I noticed that the Mail directory structure on the MBP is different in Lion than the Mail directory structure on my PB OS X 10.4.
I didn't want to overwrite the Mail directory on the MBP and find out I corrupted Mail on the new MBP.
Any advise would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

The safe "step 1," of course, is to keep an unaltered copy of the 10.4 Mail folder and plist so that if something bad happens on the new machine, you just throw out that folder and plist and try again.
The safe "step 2" is that instead of dragging the folder into the same place on the new Mac, you can copy it to a separate location, like a temporary folder in Documents, then in Apple Mail in your new Lion MBP, use File/Import Mailboxes. It will ask you where the mailboxes are, and after you point it to that folder, I'm assuming it will import and convert them to the new format and place them in the correct sub-folders. If it goes well, you can then delete the temporary copy that you made for import purposes.
The 10.4 plist might be too old since it's 3 major versions later; you can try putting it in the Preferences folder, but it seems safer to note all the settings in 10.4 and re-enter them from scratch.