Tiger upgrade of mail tries to import non existant messages

Question

On my G5 17" iMac, I've upgraded from Panther to Tiger. I can't upgrade to 10.5 because I need some OS 9 aps. The first time I open Mail in Tiger, it wants to import my 2 imap accounts. It is trying to import messages I've deleted and cleared. I synced the mail accounts on another computer and the imap account shows there are less than 2000 messages. Mail is trying to import 12k and gets hung up around 2.6k. I wants 5 hours to do the import. I tried restarting the computer. I re-synced the mail accounts and mail rules. And the thing still wants to import messages that I've cleared from the imap server.
Ideas?
Thanks.

Answer 1

The conversion from Mail 1.x to Mail 2.x is broken, but it isn’t clear what the problem really is nor what it really is that Mail is trying to import in your case. I’d set up Mail again from scratch and manually import back afterwards any messages you may have stored in local mailboxes, as follows:
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/. Move (not copy) the entire Mail folder out of there, to the Desktop.
3. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences/. Locate com.apple.mail.plist and move it to the Desktop.
4. Open Mail and set it up again from scratch. If given the option to import existing mailboxes or something like that, don’t. Just enter the account information and check that everything works fine.
5. You’ll have to re-configure your Mail > Preferences settings. For spam-related security reasons, the first thing you should do is go to Preferences > Viewing and disable Display remote images in HTML messages if it’s enabled.
6. If Mail works fine now and you had any messages stored in local mailboxes, do File > Import Mailboxes and follow the instructions to import your mail from the old Mail folder that’s now on the Desktop. Import the Mailboxes folder first, then each of the POP-username@mailserver account folders, if any.
There are two ways to import Mail 1.x mailboxes into Mail 2.x. The obvious one is importing them as Mail for Mac OS X. But Mail 1.x stored mail in standard mbox format plus some additional support files, and this allows Mail 1.x mailboxes to also be imported as Other, i.e. as generic mailboxes in standard mbox format.
Importing as Mail for Mac OS X produces the best results when it works, because it takes into consideration all the files in the mailboxes, not just the mbox files where the messages are stored, and hence, allows information such as status flags to be preserved. Importing as Other, on the other hand, may work in cases where importing as Mail for Mac OS X doesn’t, because it looks at the mbox files only, ignoring the support files which is what Mail 2.x usually chokes on, but precisely because of that, information such as status flags is lost and previously deleted messages may reappear.
Hence, you may try importing as much as you can as Mail for Mac OS X, then import the problematic mailboxes as Other.
Note that what Mail asks for when importing depends on the format chosen. Mail always asks for the folder that contains the “things” to be imported. If Mail for Mac OS X is chosen as the data format, the “things” to be imported are the .mbox folders, so you must choose the folder that contains them, not the .mbox folders themselves. On the other hand, if Other is chosen as the data format, the “things” to be imported are the mbox files, so choosing the .mbox folders would work in that case.
As a result of doing the above, some messages may be duplicated. Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts has a Remove Duplicates script that you may find useful.
Do with the imported mail whatever you wish. You may move the messages to other mailboxes and get rid of the imported mailboxes afterwards if you want.
If all is well and you don’t miss anything, the files on the Desktop can be deleted, although you may want to keep them for a while, just in case.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.