How can I tranfer all my hotmail and yahoo contacts to ichat and apple mail?

Question

My mother bought a new Macbook Pro and I'm trying to export all her email addresses/contacts to the apple mail and ichat.
Any clue on how to make this process more time effecient?
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.