Need help importing old emails to Apple Mail

July 23, 2007 5:06 AM

How do I get Apple Mail to correctly import multiple emails with the same subject header?

I have about 50 archived emails with the subject header of 'Hey' from a bunch of different people. Apple Mail is doing a fine job of mixing them all together even though I've set it up to sort mail by date. For some reason it's ignoring the dates and lumping all the 'hey' mails together. Right in the middle of my 2007 mail I have a conversation with the same subject header from 2005.

How do I fix this?

posted by valleys to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

What version of Mail are you running?
posted by scottreynen at 5:28 AM on July 23, 2007

Response by poster: 2.1.1 on Tiger 10.4.9.
posted by valleys at 5:57 AM on July 23, 2007

Turn off 'Organize By Thread' in the View menu.
posted by boaz at 6:17 AM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: boaz - that is how I want to view the rest of my mail, so I don't want to turn it off. It's only these imported threads that are a problem.
posted by valleys at 7:47 AM on July 23, 2007

"Organize By Thread" is a per-mailbox setting, so you can turn it off on one mailbox and leave it on in all others. Another option is to open ~/Library/Mail/, find the messages that are messed up, and change whatever is causing Mail to think they're part of the same thread, i.e. the subject, apparently.
posted by scottreynen at 8:30 AM on July 23, 2007

Don't you have to also change the envelope index for Mail to reflect the change to the subject header? My understanding is that email bodies can be edited in (say) TextWrangler and then when they are opened in Mail the change is reflected but not so subjects. Would love to know how if that is not the case - I have lots of blank subject emails I'd like to assign subjects to!
posted by dance at 8:17 AM on July 25, 2007