I was very happy with my mail setup in MacOS X 10.1.5. I set up SpamAssassin, had a script that would POP my mail to a local mailbox in /var/mail, and had Mail.app configured with a "UNIX Account" to check mail from that local mailbox.

It was working great.

Unfortunately, Mail 1.2 doesn't support UNIX Accounts at all! When I launched Mail, my UNIX Account was gone. To make things worse, my POP script had read hundreds of messages from the server to the local mailbox, which I couldn't fetch into Mail anymore.

After a few minutes thinking about installing popd or imapd on my machine, I realized that Mail can import standard mbox files! So I just chose File > Import Mailboxes..., selected the /var/mail folder, and imported. My mail was now in the On My Mac > Import > jim folder. All I had to do was Select All, then choose Message > Apply Rules to Selection, and my new incoming mail was filtered to the right place... except for 4 messages that belonged in the Inbox. In Mac OS X 10.1.5, you couldn't move messages into an Inbox mailbox, only out of. Thankfully, that's no longer the case.

So, it took a bit of thinking, and a bit of cursing, but I got my mail where it belonged without losing any.

Unfortunately, the Junk Mail filter in Mail.app is not as smart as SpamAssassin was, out of the box. I would have preferred to continue using SpamAssassin, whose configuration I had full control over, than Mail's filters, which I can't configure, from what I can tell so far.

The best new feature in Mail.app is being able to search across all mailboxes. Finally!!