Macinstruct

If you use Apple's Mail application, there will probably come a time when you'll want to move your email messages and email account to another Mac. Maybe you just purchased a new Mac. Or maybe you've kept your personal email at work, and you now want to move those emails and that account to your Mac at home. Fortunately, there's an easy way to move your mail!

We'll assume that your email account is located on only one Mac, and that you do not yet have an email account set up in Apple Mail on the Mac you'll be moving your email to.

Here's how to do it:

1. You will need to copy some files off the Mac that already contains the email account. To do this, you can use an external hard drive, USB flash drive, wireless network, or even FireWire target disk mode to transfer the files directly from one Mac to the other.
   
   
2. The files you want are located in your User Library. This library can be found by opening your hard drive (Macintosh HD), then going to the Users folder. There should be a folder with your user account name - that will contain a Library folder. The path to this folder can also be Macintosh HD/Users/~/Library (where ~ represents your user account name).
   
   
3. You need to copy the Mail folder (the entire folder) and move it to the same location on your second Mac. Additionally, in your User Library you will find a Preferences folder which contains a file named com.apple.mail.plist - you will also need to copy and move this to your second Mac. This will also need to be placed in its corresponding location (Macintosh HD/Users/~/LIbrary/Preferences).

   
   
   

4. If you now open Apple Mail on your second Mac, it will look exactly the same as it did on the other Mac. This means your accounts, messages, and folders have all been moved to the second Mac!