Transfer IMP mail folders to Mail.app

Oct 17, '03 09:48:00AM

Contributed by: Enkerli

This is probably less of a hint when OS X is set to English, but I found French language on-screen instructions somewhat confusing. Also, there's a caveat or two, so maybe comments will lead to a better procedure.

IMP is a PHP/MySQL Webmail solution and is quite common, at least on university systems. I recently found out you could use it to download mailbox files in standard Unix mbox format. OS X mistakes these files for actual Mail.app mailboxes (giving them mailbox icons), but you can't directly put them in ~/Library/Mailboxes/. I was still able to transfer the folder using the import procedure, but all messages are marked as new. So this might be more of a proof-of-concept thing than the best way to transfer mail. In fact, it might be easier to access the folder through Mail.app and move all messages to a convenient local mailbox ("On My Mac"). In any event, here's the procedure. In IMP 3.2.1, do:

  1. Click "Folders"
  2. Select folder to export
  3. In the "Choose Action" menu, choose "Download Folder(s)"
In Mail.app, do:
  1. Select "Import Mailboxes" in the "File" menu
  2. Choose "Standard mbox files"
  3. Press the '»' button twice to get to standard file dialog
  4. Select the folder containing your downloaded *.mbox file and press "Choose"
  5. In the newly-created "Import" or "Import-<N>" folder, you find your imported mbox which you can rename, move, etc.
The most confusing things in French were the name of the import option ("BAL" instead of "mbox") and the message before the open file dialog.

Let's hope it helps someone.

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