As far as I'm aware, it shouldn't matter which way you go. I did suggest taking 10.6 and 10.7 simply because they're OS-adjacent versions and I figured that setup was less likely to have differences between message formats, etc.

Right on...ok...shud be able to do that this morning.

Now, I've since cleared out the "bad" emails by making them "On My Mac," so they are no longer in the Server/Client chain of communications.

Does that fact obviate this test?

a

It's possible that it will negate the test. I just ran a simple test under Lion Mail. I got the Finder ID of an email in my inbox. The ID was 17012, so that means the file name is 17012.emlx. I moved the message to an On My Mac mailbox and the ID changed, so it's Finder name also changed. I moved it back to my inbox and the ID and name changed again.

Here's what I'm thinking: Try the comparison test. If the results are unwieldy and your not inclined to wade through them, then you can abandon the test without much effort having been spent. If the results aren't off-putting, you can proceed.

Here's another idea to hopefully mitigate the issue of moved messages: Create a new user account in Lion and set up the Mail account while importing it from 10.6. If I'm understanding you correctly, that should replicate the counting discrepancies you'd been seeing. You could then run the file-comparison test in that account. This assumes I'm properly understanding your current setups. The point is that, if possible, you want to re-create the 10.6/10.7 message-count issue before running the file-comparison test.

aight..

will do