mail.app, gmail, and a reformat and reinstall of snow leopard

I've had a mbp for a few years now. My old build of 10.4 was getting
mighty creaky around the edges, including as it did elements from a
build that went all the way back to 10.3 on a 17" PBG4. I decided to
back everything up with retrospect, wipe the drive, reformat, and
install a virgin build of snow leopard, and start the new decade fresh.

All went well, excluding the to be expected snow leopard headaches,
until I tried to restore my mail set up.

I have several email accounts. Two Gmail pop accounts, and my panix.com
pop account. I leave all messages on the server forever. This is my
backup, absolutely essential since I use all the accounts
professionally, and the inboxes on my ISP amount to my company's paper
trail. I also never delete anything but spam from my desktop inboxes;
that's the second set of copies. It's also my data base: type in a
contact's address into search, and there's my history of correspondence,
type in their phone number, there's all the voice mails.

Well, I dragged my old Mail and Mail downloads folders off the backup
drive, and into my library folder in my new setup. Then I launched mail.

First, it wanted to bring my index up to date, and I let it do so. Then,
prompted me to create and account. There is no way to bypass that step,
annoyingly, so I re-created one of my gmail accounts. So far so good. I
looked at the inbox window, and all my numerous filter folders were
there. All seemed to be filled with emails. My main inbox appeared to
have the old mails, and I clicked on one only to find there was no
content. So I went up on my gmail account ad re-enabled pop for all
emails, ever, assuming this would fill in the blanks. It didn't.
Instead, it began downloading all the emails again, stopping about 2
years into the account history and refusing to download any additional
emails, including emails that had arrived since the backup was made.

SO, I went on gmail's site, and re-enabled pop download for all emails,
since it seemed to have un-checked itself. And mail started downloading
the whole inbox again, starting january 2006 when I started the account,
in spite of already having those emails in the inbox.

To make a long story short, I now have 3 copies of every mail I received
from january 2006 to october of 2008, but it will go no further and
stalls there every time.

My question now to all of you, my dear fellow mac users is simple:

How do I re-virginize mail in such a way that my vast set of filters and
their attendant mailboxes remain unchanged, none of the mail I've
received is lost, and my email is current in all accounts? Everything, I
should mention, worked just fine with the panix account, but panix is a
meticulously old-school pure unix standard as they come smtp & pop
system, and of course there's NEVER a problem with that. I pay for that
one, too, of course.

I'm guessing that somewhere is a hidden document whose name does not
contain "mail" that tells mail how to treat all the various files in the
folders "mail" and "Mail downloads" in ~/Library. I"d like to to just
load my old folders and files just like it was on the old setup, so It
can just download the mail that's arrived since january 3rd this year,
with their full contents.

Anybody got a clue how to do this?

TIA!


Joshua

 

BAD idea. Why, why, WHY do people do this? In a large subset (at least 25%,
in my experience) it leads to tears which could have been avoided by just
doing a standard upgrade...

Which ones would those be, please? I've seen some people have problems, but
no two of them have had the same problems.

I have 2 Gmail accounts, a .Mac account, and three POP accounts. All are set
up in Mail.

Pretty close to how I do things.

That should have worked.

It should _NOT_ have done that.

Frankly the error appears to be in the step where it demands to set up a new
account. I've not seen that particular error as part of an upgrade problem.
Where I've seen it elsewhere the cure was to delete the Mail folder and
replace it with the Mail folder from backup... but that's where you're having
the trouble.

Is your backup a clone, a Time Machine backup, or something else? Because,
frankly, what _I_ would do first is to try and see what happens if I were to
apply the standard upgrade to a clone backup. If all goes well, then clone
the updated backup to your main drive. Of course it would be best if you
backed up the backup before trying anything with it...

I'd look in ~/Library/Preferences. com.apple.mail.plist is the obvious first
step.

 

Why drag stuff over instead of using the Migration Assistant?

[snipped tail of woe]

 

....
....

Did that poor little woe scream when you snipped off his tail? ;P

 

Yes, it was a sad tale.

 

Exactly. I was going to suggest that he go back, wipe his disk,
reinstall SL, then migrate from the backup. That's the way I did it:
first I made two SuperDuper! clones on separate external drives plus
I already had a Time Machine backup on a third drive, never more
than one of those drives attached to the computer at a time. He
might want to clone his clone before he touches it. Just to be safe.

 

Is the format of the Mail files the same in between 10.4 and 10.6?

I did a similar exercise moving from Tiger to Leopard on a new machine,
except that before I did the migration I had moved everything in my POP
account to local folders, and the other accounts were IMAP.

I think I used Finder's Archive to create a zip file, transferred that
across and unpacked it, since the target username on the new machine has
a different UID/GID and I wanted to avoid ownership problems.

(I am now cursing that I didn't keep a log of what I did.)

 

Nope. The first thing Mail will do on being launched in 10.6 after being
upgraded is to 'update the database'. Once this is done you can no longer use
that particular Mail database with earlier versions. However, it should _not_
ask if it can create a new account.

Basically every time Apple does a major OS upgrade Mail gets refurbished and
enough changes that once you open things up with the new version you can't go
back. It's the same with other major apps, such as iTunes and Pages.

 

Had you restored _BOTH_ Mail's Preference file
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist _and_ Mail folder
~/Library/Mail you would not have been prompted to create an account and
all would have been well. But don't worry, just do this overwriting any
new files and launch Mail once again. All will then be as it was