Mail backup on Mountain Lion clean install

Question

I'm installing a new SSD in my Mac Pro and want to set it up as a clean install of ML so not from a previous TM Backup.
I only want copy the whole of mail - with all the mailboxes and filters intact and without having to set this up again.
Any help in how I do this would be really appreciate.
Thanks in advance, Matt

Answer 1

This will be a lot easier if you make a secondary backup using something like Carbon Copy Cloner. (That's good practice anyway... relying on one single backup isn't all that safe overall. I've seen plenty of people who only discovered their one-and-only backup was corrupt once they needed it, or who did something wrong in the restore process and destroyed it.)
Then, when you're ready to restore Mail, you need the following folders from the backup:
Users/yourusername/Library/Mail/
Users/yourusername/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/
Move those folders from the backup to the same location on the new system. The difficulty will be that, in Mountain Lion, the user Library folder is invisible, so what will make your life easier is to run the following command in the Terminal before making your backup with Carbon Copy Cloner:
chflags nohidden ~/Library
(Terminal is in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.)