Migrating Mail.app rules from 10.6 to 10.8

Question

I want to move my Mail.app filtering rules from my old 10.6 machine to a fresh 10.8 install. I've seen people talking about moving these by copying over MessageRules.plist, but I haven't seen anyone address whether these are compatible between 10.6 and 10.8. Thanks!

Answer 1

I copied all of the user-created <dict>...</dict> items from my old MessageRules.plist and added them to:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/UnsyncedRules.plist

When I launched Mail.app again, they were in my rules, but disabled. One click on each and they ran fine.

Note: Simply replacing the entire set of <dict>...</dict> items in UnsyncedRules.plist will not work. You must add them into the current set of items in order for it to work properly.

Answer 2

For all those who tried copying the MessageRules.plist file over from 10.6 to 10.8 and got nothing here's what I did to get them working.

Essentially copy all the rules via copy/paste from MessageRules.plist (10.6) to SyncedRules.plist (10.8) - use a text editor to copy and paste everything from the </array> tags in the old file to the new one. Then restart Mail.

Longer version: Copy MessageRules.plist from Users>User>Library>Mail> on your 10.6 machine to anywhere your 10.8 machine. Open up the file in a text editor and copy everything between the <array></array> Tags. Then paste it all in the file SyncedRules.plist on your 10.8 machine in Library>Mail>V2>MailData inbetween the<array> tags. Restart the Mail app and all the rules should show up in preferences section.

Mail will slowly even create the folders/mailboxes to store the messages in folders that don't exist but are pointed too in your rules that you imported.