May 04, '05 10:22:00AM • Contributed by: dylanjames
When I launched Mail.app the first time after installing Tiger, it converted all my old email archives to the new format. So far so good. However, I found that in my main work mailbox, all of the messages between January 29th and yesterday were all missing. Oh no! I'd backed up my Library folder a week before (a long story involving AppleCare, a dead hard drive, and a BTO PowerBook), but I really didn't want to lose even just a week of mail.
I went into my user's Library: Preferences: Mail: AccountName folder, and ran vi mbox. To my relief, all of my messages were there. So, I tried to manually reimport them as Mail.app archives using Mail.app's File: Import Mailboxes menu option -- thinking maybe the problem was the simultaneous import and Spotlight index operation). Still no go. My last-ditch try was to import them as "Other" in Mail's import options. This time, it worked.
Lesson: back those Library folders up! And if Mail.app fails to import its own archives, try the "Other" format (which I believe is a generic mbox parser). It would appear the Mail.app mbox parser might be a bit too smart for its own good.
