Can anyone help me move my email from my mac mini to my new macbook pro

Question

mac book pro   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Mail stores most preferences and all account settings in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist (except the passwords, which are stored in the keychain). Everything else, including all your messages and mailboxes, is stored within the ~/Library/Mail/ folder.
Similarly, Address Book stores the settings in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist and the data in ~/Library/Application Support/AddresBook/.
Other applications store preferences and data in other places. You may want to ask in the appropriate forums for more information on those.
If both computers are running the same major version of Mac OS X, copying these files & folders from one computer to the other is all you need to do in order to have an exact copy of all your data on both computers.
In order to avoid potential permission issues, copy the files operating on the destination computer and while logged in as the user that’s going to use them. Also, be sure the affected applications aren’t running on either computer while doing that.
You may also want to read the following articles:
How to back up and restore your important Mac OS X 10.4 files
Transferring files between two Macintosh computers
Transferring data with Setup Assistant / Migration Assistant FAQ
If the major version of Mac OS X on the new computer is different, some applications may need to convert the old data to a new, different format. The data format used by Mail 2.x, in particular, is different from Mail 1.x. Problem is, the conversion from Mail 1.x to Mail 2.x is broken, and it may work or it may fail miserably, so be prepared for it if the version of Mac OS X running on the old computer is older than 10.4 (Tiger).
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder.