File Menu - Import Sub-Menu
Apple Mail - OS 10.4 Mail

With the introduction of Tiger (OS 10.4) the format of Apple Mail files changed. Messages are now in individual .emlx files.

These files are located within a series of folders in your personal Library folder (not the general Library folder). There isn't room to show the full path to these files in one window, so here it is in two windows:

If you haven't created folders and Rules for directing all your email messages into folders, your messages may be in the Inbox. The Inbox is in a slightly different place. In the same folder as the Mailboxes (folder listed above), you will find a folder that begins POP- and includes your email address. In that folder will be an INBOX.mbox folder. This is where your Inbox messages are located.

 When you select Import: Apple Mail: OS 10.4 in the File menu the open dialog will automatically take you to the Mailboxes folder in your personal Library. If you are looking for your Inbox or Sent messages, you will have to use the popup menu to go back up one level to find your POP folder.

If you created folders in the Mail application for different kinds of email, those folders will appear here with .mbox after the name. Open the desired .mbox folder and then open the "Messages" folder within it. When you see a list of .emlx files, you have reached the actual message files.

Click the Open button. A dialog will appear giving you several options.

If a datafile with the exact field structure needed for email import is not open, the only option will be to create a new datafile. This is always the safest option. You can later adjust the field structure and merge datafiles if needed.
If you have a datafile open with the appropriate fields, you can add or merge the imported records into the existing datafile.

Add to current datafile

This will append the imported records to the current datafile. No attempt will be made to determine if a message already exists in the datafile. To avoid duplicate records, you must be sure that messages you previously imported are not in the folder that you are now importing.

Merge into current datafile

This will sort the current datafile and only import messages that are not already in the datafile. If there is the slightest difference, iData 3 will see it as a new message.

Email Record Structure

iData 3 places the message portion of each imported email message into the Freeform Text Area of a record. In addition, any existing data of the following types will be put into matching fields:

         Subject
         Date
         From
         Reply to
         To
         cc
         Newsgroups
         References

To import an email file into  an existing datafile, that datafile must have eight fields, and they should be in the same order as specified above, although the precise names of the fields may vary. (Even though not every email has data in all those fields, there is no way to predict this, so the iData format is generalized to cover the most common cases. When viewing imported email datafiles in List View, you can use the Modify Fields function to specify that some fields should be hidden. Please see the Modify Fields topic in the Edit chapter for details.)

Import Speed

Depending on the speed of your particular machine and the percentage of html-based messages, importing a mailbox with, say, 2000 messages may take anywhere from 20 seconds up to about 2 minutes. Html messages take longer than plain text, as they require an additional translation stage. An html message can take as much as three seconds per message. Plain text messages mixed in with html messages will not take as long.

If it seems that the import is going on for longer than normal, you can abort the import process at any time by typing the esc key or command-period. However, if you know that the mailbox being imported is large, it's probably best to be patient. When the process is aborted, messages that have already been imported will show up in the datafile.
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