how to migrate all your pop3 mail into imap via apple mail

i just completely switched over my business email over to imap servers at rackspace. i was up until now in mixed mode when it came to email. one of my business email accounts were being popped through a different email provider, the other was imap via rackspace. last week i killed the old pop email and created a forward to my imap at rackspace.

then i wanted to get all my old [already popped email] on to the imap servers at rackspace. so basically here is what i did. in apple mail.app i already had my imap account setup so its really easy....

1. drag the old folders over from your pop account into your imap account in apple mail.app.

2. it will then send all your mail from your local machine up to your imap server.

3. it then automatically adds the folders one at a time and uploads all the previously popped email.

4. i went and got lunch since i moved 3.5gb of old mail up to the imap server - when i came back i had to do some housekeeping...

5. some folders were duplicated... here is an example - in the imap side i already had a folder called vendors - instead of overwriting the folder apple mail.app created a new folder called "vendors (messages)" on the imap server. i had about 20 duplicate folders to contend with. but i have 9 zillion folders in my email system.

6. i then went into to the "vendors (messages)" folder and selected all the messages and dragged them into the "vendors" folder. i did this for each duplicated folder.

7. after all the mail was moved i deleted the duplicate folders and did a quick sync

everything worked great, now i have all my mail on my imap server at rackspcace!