Trying to Restore from Dead Hard Drive

Question

The hard drive in my PowerBook recently died. I was able to salvage my mail store and wanted to move my filed mail folders into the mail store on my iMac. So I moved the folders at ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ into the corresponding location on my iMac. However, even though the folders are recognized, they appear empty when selected in Mail.app. I have tried rebuilding the folders and had the envelope index rebuilt, but neither of these fixed my problem. I know the messages are there because I can see the .emlx files in the correct directories. Does any have a clue how I can fix this? Any advice is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Rather than tinkering with the contents of the ~/Library/Mail/ folder, you should have tried to import those mailboxes doing File > Import Mailboxes, choosing Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and following the instructions.
In the Finder, do File > Get Info (⌘I) on any of those *.emlx files and on the Messages folder that contains them. Do you have Read & Write access permissions for them?
If you cannot import them by normal means, you may try using something like emlx to mbox Converter or Emailchemy to convert the *.emlx files to standard mbox format, then import that in Mail as Other.