import mailbox from former user to new user in Mail.app

Hi,

On a Mac mini running 10.6.8, a staff member has departed her position. The person who is replacing her needs access to the former employee's mailboxes which were local IMAP mailboxes. (This is just the way it is done -- not my idea).

Is there any way in which these mailboxes can be imported to the new IMAP account? If so, how would I go about this?

If a webpage explaining this could be pointed to or some words of advice to get me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

 

Depends on the email application and the email server. If this involves
Exchange, you'd best look in a Microsoft news group. Someone there may
be an Exchange admin.

If it's standard email, do you have the password to the email account?
If you're the administrator for the email server, you should have it or
be able to reset it. If not, contact them to do that. If they've
deleted her email, have them do a full restore of her account. There
_must_ be a procedure for what to do with departed employees (e.g.
remove any network access to their accounts, desktop, laptop and phone.
Obtain any company property at the exit interview. Sign termination
agreement aka gag order).

Many companies don't think and wipe stuff when HR says "this person is
leaving". Or they forget to remove accounts and stuff after a
contractor departs. I don't know how many things I've cleaned up after
coming on board and auditing my systems.

If you don't have password access to the IMAP server, obtain it. Either
have the new person login as the old person and drag the email to local
folders. The problem with having email on local machines is that unless
you have a remote desktop backup methodology setup, if that machine goes
down, you've lost data.

If your company doesn't have a exit procedure for employees AND
contractors, you should push for one. Write yourself because most
managers prefer someone who's already done the work, so they don't have
to.

 

Thanks for your reply.

It's not an Exchange server. It's a Linux box.

I should note that I copied the ~/Library/Mail folder of the former employee to the /Users/Shared folder and then tried to use Apple Mail to import the mailboxes. It did so but all the import ended up being was a small hierarchy of empty folders which did not include the local IMAP folder which, apparently, was just skipped by Mail.app.

 

(snip)

Probably you already thought of this but:

Are the permissions on the folder you copied to /Users/Shared
sufficient for your new user so that when you are using Apple's Mail
as the new user to copy in the folder from /Users/Shared, everything
is readable?

 

Lucky it's Linux and that you control it. It could have been a
corporate email account on some server "in the cloud" that they
outsourced. Getting stuff done in that environment is very hard.

I don't know if Apple Mail can read mbox format files, only import them.
I'm assuming that's what your mail server is using for a storage format.

If you want to 'do it all' for the user, you might look at

http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/

They do a great job of offering importing files. They run on a
subscription model, so you have to 'buy it again' if you want it
upgraded. I used it to convert mbox files to Apple Mail and it worked
like a charm with mime attachments.

 

Yes. I changed the ownership on the entire hierarchy. Thanks for the thought.

 

One might have to put the mbox files into a folder, and then import
the folder. If directly importing doesn't work, try this (depends on
the version of Apple Mail, though I can't recall where this changed).

Billy Y..

 

If it's an imap account, why mess with importing actual files and
folders? All you need is to set up the account, which requires, of
course, the password.

 

I had this problem in a major company a dozen years ago. All the
account names were based on a 3 character mnemonic from which you could
derive their internal email address and look them up in the internal
phone book etc. One department manager decided to ignore that and give
new employees access to the accounts of departed employees.

I was blissfully unaware of this so when I got the list of departed
employees I started deleting stuff and had one very snotty manager
sending me angry and threatening emails as a result.

After the above episode I asked our security department what the
official policy was regarding departed employees or contractors and it
turned out they didn't have one. :-(

So yes, push for an officially sanctioned policy on what to do with
departed staff. Bear in mind that you may need to archive the emails of
*at least* customer or supplier facing staff for audit or legal
requirements.