Problems importing mail from one user to another on same computer

Question

Hi,
I work from home so I created a new account on my computer so I could have a personal user and a business user. That way maybe I won't always end up working when I'm trying to relax. So I want to bring all my old work emails over the the new work account. But when I copy the mail files to the new user account and then try to import, the folders all have red circles with minus signs. I gather that this has something to do with permissions, but when I change the owner to the new user, they still have the red circles. I also tried just moving the whole mail folder over to the new user, but it's "read only".
Both users are administrators. I'm running OS 10.4.4.
Thanks in advance for any advice!

Answer 1

Hi Andrew.
What you tried to transfer the Mail folder from one user to the other should have worked, except I believe you didn't properly change ownership of the files and folders involved.
7. open new user Mail
8. Mail asks me to set up an email account
This probably happened because you didn't change ownership of the com.apple.mail.plist file. If Mail doesn't have access permission to write to that file, it just deletes the file and creates a new one (Mail can delete the file because doing that requires write permissions for the directory the file is in, which it has). As a result of re-creating the preferences file, Mail asks you to set up your accounts from scratch all over again.
14. change the ownership of the mail folder to the
new user, but I still can't look inside the folder
and it has the red circle with the minus sign.
It looks like you tried changing ownership of the enclosing Mail folder only. Ownership of all the items within it must be changed as well. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this properly in the Finder, as the Apply to enclosed items button in the Get Info window also overwrites access permissions, not just the changes you make to ownership. Usually, this is wrong, as a different set of permissions may be appropriate for each item. In the particular case of the Mail folder, however, you can come close to doing the right thing as follows:
1. In the Finder, go to HOME/Library/. Locate the Mail folder, select it and choose File > Get Info (⌘I). Under Ownership & Permissions, expand Details by clicking on it.
2. Change the settings as follows (you may need to click on the lock icon to authenticate first). Owner: username, with "Read & "Write" access permissions; Group: username, with "Read only" access permissions; Others: "No Access".
3. Click on the Apply to enclosed items button at the bottom of the Get Info window.
4. Change Group access back to "No Access", which probably was (or should be) the initial setting when you opened the Info window.
5. Close the Get Info window.
The right way to (recursively) change ownership of the Mail folder without altering access permissions would be issuing the following command in Terminal:
sudo chown -R username:username ~/Library/Mail
And while you're at it, you may as well use Terminal to change ownership of the preferences file:
sudo chown username:username ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist