How to duplicate a personal mailbox structure in Mail

Question

I'm posting this because there may be someone else who wanted to do this but couldn't figure out a way to do it.
Ever wondered if there was a relatively easy way to duplicate a Personal Mailbox structure without creating every individual folder again? I keep my mail grouped by year and at the start of each new year I replicate the personal mailbox structure ready for the next year.  For example in my "2012 Mail" folder I have categories like Apple, Business, Family, Friends, Goverment.... etc and many of them have sub folders to further categorise.  I move messages from my inbox to those folders once I have dealt with them.
So now I wanted to create a duplicate strucutre for 2013.  There isn't a method in Mail to allow you to copy the folder structure.  If there was, I wouldn't be writing this.
If you have folders which define a category that covers mulitple years then you are probably not interested in this.
Caution:  You need to be confident with ferreting around folder structures and the way Mail works.  If you are not confident or this is all gobbledegook to you then don't attempt this.  Although I have listed the steps as carefully as possible, I take no responsibility if you mess it up.
To begin with I copied the folder  /users/<home>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/2012 Mail.mbox to the desktop.  (The <home> folder is the one on the left of your Finder window denoted by the "House" icon.)  Took a while becasue there was a lot of mail.
The next thing to do was to go through each of the folders and subfolders and remove the data (mail messages) thus leaving just the "shell" or structure. The message data uder each subfolder is nested in a folder that has a very long alphanumeric name.  The folder might look a bit like this which is what one of mine looked like 5F7900ED-92AF-4459-B261-921142309EFE.  Drag it to the Trash or Right click and select "Move to Trash".  There was a lot of deleting to do but it took only a few minutes.
Once I had my structure created and I had emptied the trash, I renamed the folder to "2013 Mail.mbox" and copied it back to my /users/<home>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes folder.
At this point I closed Mail becasue I wanted Mal to pick up the new folder and make it visible in my Personal folder list
Next I had to make a hidden file visible so that I could remove it before I started Mail again.  If you simply run Mail expecting to see the new structure appear in your folder list.... you wont.
To make that hidden file visible I needed to fire up Terminal and enter the following commands (copy them and paste them in your terminal window)
     defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
     killall Finder
The first command flags hidden files to be visible and the second command restarts Finder so that they can now be seen.
Back to folder /users/<home>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes and now I could see a file named .mboxCache.plist (It is kind of greyed out to signify that it is a hidden file.)  I moved it to the Desktop.
I restarted Mail and a new folder appeared which had a very long name /Users/<home>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/2013 Mail.mbox so I renamed it to 2013 Mail.
Now to go back to Terminal and make the hidden files "hidden" again.  Type the following commands (or copy and paste them into your Terminal window)
     defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
     killall Finder
Job done.
Hope that helps someone.
Chris

Answer 1

is there another way? or is it just not possible?
gr
Joeri