Mailbox Problems

Question

Multiple weird problems with Mailboxes on Mail 2.0.7. I just moved to g5 imac running system 10.4.6 (I plan to update the system to 10.4.11 soon).
1. When I try to add a mailbox called Book Orders, it gives me this message: Unable to create path ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Book Orders.mbox.
2. The mail in the user created mailboxes on my old computer (imac g3, 10.2) have mysteriously disappeared. It was all there the last time I used the computer before I got the new one. But today when I fired it up again, the mailboxes were there, but empty.
3. When I try to use import to get the mail from my old inbox, which is backed up on an external drive, it tells me it imported something, but then when I open Mail, there is no import there.
4. The Drafts mailbox seems to appear and disappear randomly.
Thanks for any suggestions.
-- Donna

Answer 1

The path to Mail is supposed to be gray, along with the Choose button, so that's not a problem. If you're having trouble adding a mailbox, you should try creating a new User Account and setting up Mail there to see if the same problem manifests itself. If it does, then it's a system-wide problem, otherwise it's something specific to your primary account. Also, have you tried using Disk Utility to Repair Permissions yet? If not, I'd do that, too, as that would eliminate that as a potential problem.
How did you backup your old mail; did you copy the entire Mail folder, or just the individual mailboxes themselves? If you backed up the entire Mail folder, you should be able to drill down to the individual mbox folders inside, open those, open the Messages folder inside and see the actual messages that are there, if any. They'd be listed is individually numbered files; i.e., xxxx.eml, emlx, or something similar.
As far as other email clients, there's Eudora (which is quite old), as well as Thunderbird, both of which BDAqua mentioned. There's also the Balzac email program, Gyaz Mail, GNUMail, and even the new Correo, which is still in beta, if you want to try any of them.
Since we've exhausted just about everything except the first two things I mentioned at the top of this post, the next step would be an Archive & Install, with the option to Preserve Users and Network Settings.
Mulder