Mail only imports a few messages from old version...

Question

Hi there!
Just got my new machine and am in the process of copying all my stuff over from the old one.
I have 7 email accounts, all of them POP except one, my Hotmail account which uses Daniel Parnell's httpmail plugin so I can send and receive from within Mail.
I used the normal 'import mailboxes' command and successfully imported everything into the new version of Mail (I was using Mail previously as well, on 10.3.9) except for the inboxes of 2 accounts.....the Hotmail account and one of the POP accounts. On these, it imports about 50 of the most recent messages and ignores the rest. I tried several times and always get the same result! I know the mail is there, it shows when I open Mail on my old computer....but it just refuses to import into the new version of Mail.
These are also my oldest email accounts.....with the most messages.....could that have something to do with it? The largest account has about half a gigabyte of email in it.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated! Anyone else have this problem???
Thanks in advance...
Steve.
Macbook Pro 17"/Dual 2.33   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   100 gig 7200 rpm HD, 2 GB RAM

Answer 1

I have a variation of this same problem.
HISTORY:
Yesterday I began to create a new mailbox to be stored on my Mac for Sent Mail from 2006 to be transferred from another existing Sent Mail mailbox (also on my Mac) that, via Mail Rules, I have all sent mail from a single AOL account archived in--I wanted to begin feeding the last days of 2006 mail into it, and then let the pre-existing Sent Mail collect messages for 2007. The 2006 file was just over 125 MB, and along with a 2005 Sent Mail file and a 2005 Received Mail file of AOL archives, was to reside in a parent folder for AOL, simply called AOL Past Mail. Simply put, I have separate annual Sent and Received mailboxes stored on my Mac for two of my three e-mail accounts within larger folders labeled Past Mail for each account.
In a long story made short: I went to Rename (under Mail>Mailboxes menu) the parent mailbox from "Past AOL Mail: 2005" to "Past AOL Mail: 2005-" (thus with a dash to let that folder be open-ended for subsequent annual mailboxes to be added for each year). I got a message that Mail could not rename the box, and the next thing I know, there is my old Parent mailbox/folder (Past AOL Mail) whited out with four blue mailbox/folders filed within it (these included 2 folders for Received Mail for 2005 and 2006 and the Sent Mail folders for the two years). When I selected the whited out parent folder or one of the blue-colored sub-folders (the Sent and Received mailboxes) it said I had "0 Messages" in each.
After initial panic, I realized that I had my entire hard drive backed up (just up to the day before--this is a complete bootable clone of the laptop that these mailboxes are on, made by SuperDuper! software). After reading Mail Help (and BEFORE coming to this discussion forum), I tried to do an Import Mailboxes (under File in Mail menu) from the external back-up HD (over the standard FireWire 800 cable connection) by choosing the "Other" option.
The Import began smoothly enough but when it finished it had only copied mail from Jan. 1-April 10, 4:00pm. I repeated this process several times (even once with a second back-up HD that was not quite as recently updated, and once with the "Mail for Mac OS X" option) and every time got 229 messages of exactly those dates and time. Yet the messages in the "mbox" on the back-up HD clearly showed over 1,000 files dated through Dec. 24.
THE CURRENT PROBLEM:
Now what was once a single archived mailbox of AOL mail from Jan. 1-Dec. 24 exists in three separate locations--at least the files exist.
1) LaCie back-up HD: April 10, 11:45pm-Dec. 24 (Oddly the efforts to "Import Mailboxes" under Mail>File seem to have removed the 229 messages that were partially imported.)
2) In various Import Folders "mboxes": Jan. 1-Apr. 10, 4pm.
3) On the IMAP server (AOL), which can be dragged to any reassembled folder on my desktop, if done before the messages expire on the AOL server:
Dec. 1-current.
QUESTIONS:
1-Instead of deleting the whole Library>Mail folder from my laptop, can I just remove the broken folder I am trying to reconstitute from Library>Mail, and replace it with the (nearly) complete folder from the back-up?
2-If I were to do step 1 above, should I remove all other files from the mbox folder (Info.plist, content_index, and tableofcontents) that I am draggin in from the back-up, or leave them?
3-Having read the suggested steps for similar, but it seems significantly different, problems in this thread, my big concern is with the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. I don't want to remove it from my laptop if there is a risk that other perfectly good mailboxes on the laptop would be adversely affected. If it is necessary to allow Mail to read the full mbox being transferred from the back-up, would there likely be any difference in the com.apple.mail.plist from the back-up, which was made just 7 hours before this whole nightmare happened?
Enormous thanks for any guidance you can give to this.
--Laird Ellis
PowerBook G4 15" 1.5GHz/80GB/512RAM; PB 12" 1.5GHz/100GB/1.25GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   iPod 40GB; Wireless Mighty Mouse/Wireless Mouse
PowerBook G4 15" 1.5GHz/80GB/512RAM; PB 12" 1.5GHz/100GB/1.25GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   iPod 40GB; Wireless Mighty Mouse/Wireless Mouse