In my office I'm working on a Mac Pro, on the road I'm using a MacBook Pro. Syncing my mailboxes with .Mac never has worked for me, so I came up with another solution. Since I'm familiar with the command line and never scared to go underneath the GUI, here's my Mail syncing procedure. Before you even think of following the steps below, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP. Use at own risk!!! I cannot be held responsible for any data loss etc. etc. For this HOWTO I assume that both machines are in the same network, the Mac Pro being 192.168.0.1, the MacBook Pro being 192.168.0.2. This will work for at least Mail 2 and Mail 3. Please note that the backslash '' means that the command is continued in the next line. Type it as on single line in the terminal. 1. sync the mailboxes: on the Mac Pro (in the terminal) do a rsync -ave ssh –delete /Users/yourUsername/Library/Mail/ 192.168.0.2:/Users/yourUsername/Library/Mail/ 2. sync the downloads (if you need to) Here we need a little trick. The downloads are stored at /Users/yourUsername/Library/Mail Downloads/ note the blank between Mail and Downloads. rsync and any other *nix command line tool doesn't really like that. Although you can still use that by emclosing the whole path by quotes, I never do that. Rather I setup a symlink to work with. I do this only on the remote machine though.
- mkdir /mailDownloads
- ln -s /Users/yourUsername/Library/Mail Downloads/ /Users/yourUsername/mailDownloads
Now we can go on with the sync (back on the Mac Pro): rsync -ave ssh –delete /Users/yourUsername/Library/Mail Downloads/ 192.168.0.2:/Users/yourUsername/mailDownloads/ 3. Update the preferences on the MacBook Pro: Note: You only need to do that, if you changed your account settings after the last sync. Now that all the files are moved over to the MacBook we need to tell Mail about the accounts. All these information are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist If both your machines run the same software version (mine do), it should be save to simply copy the preferences to the Book. If not, I cannot tell whether there are differences in the preference file that would break the application. 4. You're done Start Mail on the Book and check it out. Let me know if that worked for you, and also, if it did not.