Import from old computer - double check my thinking?

[AJEmail]

In a nutshell, here’s my situation:

Problem: I’m missing a couple of years of archived emails from my eagle filer.

They likely live on an old computer that used to be my daily driver. The challenge is that I haven’t logged on to that box in a bit and have done a ton of archiving/organizing since that logon.

So…

Obviously, it’s a no go to have that computer connected to wifi/internet when I login - since these are imap accounts that update would start deleting the emails I’m actually trying to grab.

So… AND HERE’S MY QUESTION:

I logon to this computer without any internet connection and backup the emails to eagle filer, right?

Question - is there any difference between grabbing the mbox files and importing from inside of mail? I’m stuck with whatever data is there, either way, right? Will an individual email import result in more detail/info than the complete mbox? (for reference, if this matters, the accounts I’m most concerned about are 1 .Mac address and one exchange address.)

Second question - what’s the easiest way to handle duplicates from that import? Is there a way before merging two eagle filer libraries to select which one is the default? (i.e. if the email exists in both always use the copy from this library?)

Thanks for any help on this and for pointing out any issues I haven’t thought through.

[Michael_Tsai]

@AJEmail

Question - is there any difference between grabbing the mbox files and importing from inside of mail? I’m stuck with whatever data is there, either way, right? Will an individual email import result in more detail/info than the complete mbox? (for reference, if this matters, the accounts I’m most concerned about are 1 .Mac address and one exchange address.)

In theory, the results should be the same. But there’s a small chance that Mail inadvertently connects to the server—or freaks out when it can’t—and messes up the data somehow. So to me it seems like there’s no upside to doing this from within Mail and you should just import the .imapmbox folders directly. When converting these to mbox format, SpamSieve may find that some parts of the messages are missing, but without being able to redownload from the server you’re stuck with what’s there.

@AJEmail

Second question - what’s the easiest way to handle duplicates from that import? Is there a way before merging two eagle filer libraries to select which one is the default? (i.e. if the email exists in both always use the copy from this library?)

EagleFiler does not deduplicate e-mails stored in different mailbox files. There’s more information about what you can do with duplicates here.