Coordinating files between Mac Mini and Powerbook Pro

Question

How can I synchronize email between 2 computers.
Posted: Jan 15, 2008 12:53 PM
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I have my own domain which I use for email <edited by moderator>. When I am at home I use my Mac Mini. When I travel I use my Macbook Pro. I use Mail for email. What is the easiest way to keep my email synched on my two Macs, including Sent mail? When I am about to travel I would also like to synch my Address book, iCal, and my Documents. Can this be done automatically?
I would appreciate any assistance.
Thanks
Stan Trollip

Answer 1

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you have your Mail client set up as POP and that you've permanently downloaded all of your mail onto one machine. That one machine I will refer to as your primary machine. The machine you want to add the same messages to, I will refer to as your secondary machine. (I'm not sure as to how much knowledge you have of this subject, so please pardon some of my explanations if they seem too simple or beginner level for you.) If you have downloaded all of your mail off the server and onto your machine then I want to be very sure that you first save off the mail stored on your Mac before changing account settings to IMAP. If you don't save a copy of your mail off before you delete the account settings for POP, then you will loose all of your mail forever.
To manually back up all of your e-mail from Mac OS X Mail:
1. First close Mac OS X Mail
2. In the Finder, go to your Home directory and open the "Library" folder.
3. Copy the "Mail" folder to a safe place.
The "Mail" folder contains all of your e-mail and all of the folders they reside in... meaning, Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Trash, and any other folders you may have created to store messages in.
After copying your "Mail" directory to a safe location, open Mac OS X Mail and delete the POP account and then set up your IMAP account. Go ahead and click the "Get Mail" button at the top to import any new mail you might have.
At this point, you need to be able to access your old e-mail messages from within Mac OS X Mail. We're going to do some rather complex copying of files around, so take your time as you work through this process. You can go ahead and close Mac OS X Mail for the moment. On your desktop, you're going to need to have two Finder windows open. First open the Finder to your Home directory. Open "Library" and then "Mail." Keep that Finder window open and then open up the "Mail" directory that you saved off earlier. If you don't know how to open up a second separate Finder window, you may do that by holding down the Command key (aka "Apple" key) while clicking on the folder to open. In the first Finder window that you opened (Home > Library > Mail), you should see a folder named "IMAP-your account name." Go ahead and open that folder and look for another folder named, "INBOX.imapmbox." Inside this folder is another folder called, "Messages." Open the Messages folder. (If you do not yet have a "Messages" folder, then you may create one... just be sure that you put in a capital "M" for "Messages.") This is the folder where you are going to copy your old Inbox mail into. In the other Finder window you have open, you should see a "POP-your account name" folder there. In a similar manner browse to: "INBOX.mbox" > "Messages." In this folder, you will see all of the e-mail you had in your Inbox. All email messages are named with a number and have a ".emlx" extension. Just press Command + A to select all the files and then press Command + C to copy them all into memory. In your first Finder window for your IMAP account, paste (Command + V) the messages you copied from your old account.
At this point, go ahead and leave both Finder windows open for now and open up Mac OS X Mail. At first you won't see all the e-mail messages you copied over. In order to make Mail see what you have done, you need to go up to the menu item "Mailbox" and then select "Rebuild." Within a few moments you should begin to see all of your old mail in your Inbox. If you have seen success from this, then you are beginning to understand how the Mac OS X Mail client interacts with the raw files on the filesystem. Pretty interesting, eh?
Ok, now you may want to copy over all of your old "Sent" messages. To do this, first create a new message (contents don't matter... it's just a sample test message) and e-mail it to a different mail account. Once the message has been sent, close Mail.
In your first Finder window (for your IMAP account), you need to back up a couple of folders to get back to your "IMAP-your account name" folder. Now you should see a "Sent Messages.imapmbox" folder. Much like what we have done before... you should see a "Messages" folder here. It may only contain 1 item - that being the test e-mail you just sent. Like before, you need to browse to your old "POP-your account name" folder and look for your "Sent.mbox" folder. Again, go into the "Messages" folder and copy all the messages here and then go to your first Finder window and paste the files there. Open Mac OS X Mail again, but this time click on your "Sent" folder on the left to view your sent messages. With this folder selected, again go up to the menu item, "Mailbox" and click on "Rebuild." Now you should see all of your old sent messages.
Apply this knowledge to copying over any "Outbox" and/or "Deleted" items you may want to keep.
Let's say that you had custom folders created in your old Mail account that you stored e-mail messages in... For example, you filed all of your financial e-mail in the "Financial" folder, and all e-mail from family in your "Family" folder... and you want those old folders and e-mail messages to show up in your newly configured mail client. This process is fairly easy, but it is very different from what we did above. Go ahead and close out Mac OS X Mail if you still have it open. In your first Finder window back up a couple of directories or just go to Home directory > "Library" > "Mail." Inside the "Mail" folder you should see a folder simply called, "Mailboxes." If not, then open Mac OS X Mail back up and create a temporary folder for now and then exit Mail again. Now you should see the "Mailboxes" folder. Open this folder and you should see the directory that you just created and it will have a ".mbox" extension on it. All you need to do is go to the old "POP-your account name" directory (where you saved off your old mail) and browse to the "Mailboxes" folder and then copy each folder from there to your IMAP "Mailboxes" folder. When you open up Mac OS X mail, you should see those folders appear after a few moments. If by chance you don't see any e-mail inside any of those folders, then just "Rebuild" each folder... from inside each folder.
Let me know how this works for you and if you have any further questions.