Trouble importing Messages from Mail

Question

Greetings,
I need to import my old messages from my old G3 machine to my Intel iMac. Both are running 10.4 and mail 2.x
I go to file>import mailboxes and then select Import from another copy of Mail.
I then go to Library>Mail and then select a folder that has mailboxes in it.
It doesn't matter if I choose one that has the extension .mbox, or just the name of the account; it just crashes Mail.
The only time I've been moderately successful is trying to import my sub mailboxes, which are in a parent folder with the extension .mbox. All folders in this parent folder are .mbox. This differs from the others, which have a variety of folder types. The mailboxes in this homogenous folder show up in the import list, but then none of the messages import, just the mailboxes themselves. Never mind that I don't really need these messages.
What I'd really like to do is to drop the old messages into my new inbox so I have a complete set going all the way back. How do I do this? What am I doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hello Oral History.
Mail crashes (i.e. quits unexpectedly) even if you select the wrong folder? Don’t you even get a “No valid Mail for Mac OS X files were found” error message in those cases?
There could be more than one thing amiss here. Does Mail otherwise work fine on the Intel iMac? In particular, can you create custom “On My Mac” mailboxes in Mail by means of Mailbox > New Mailbox or does Mail complain with some error message when you try to do that?
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described in the following article:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
Do you have any Mail plug-ins? In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you may just copy it from this post and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You may then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
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.