17 Apr, 2009
Archiving Old Emails in Apple Mail
Having too many emails in your company email account can be a problem. Not only can Mail become sluggish, but nightly backups by your IT department will take longer and require more storage space. This tutorial will explain how to move emails from your server account to your local computer. Since most of my subscribers are from Visions In Education, this tutorial will assume you’re using an IMAP server and Apple Mail, which is what we use at Visions.
What the heck is an IMAP anyway?
IMAP is an email protocol that stores your email on a server, and keeps them there until you delete them. This means you can access your email account from any computer, and all your emails will be there. What you’ll be learning in this tutorial is how to move old emails that you want to keep from the server to your local computer’s hard drive. Those emails will no longer exist on the server, but you’ll have local copies in case you ever need to reference them.
Moving Messages to a Local Mailbox
Before moving messages off the server, you’ll want to decide how you’re going to organize them: will you put everything in one big folder, or create multiple folders for better organization? For this example, I’m going to be creating a single folder. In IMAP parlance, a folder is actually called a “mailbox.” Here’s how to create a new mailbox/folder in Apple Mail:
- Click the [+] button at the bottom of the Mailboxes column, then select “New Mailbox” from the popup window.
- Next, select “On My Mac” from the Location dropdown. This is where local mailboxes are stored, outside of the server. Give the new mailbox a name.
- You can now begin dragging and dropping messages from your Inbox (or other mailboxes) into your newly created mailbox, which you’ll find in the On My Mac section in the Mailboxes column. Messages moved into the On My Mac section will no longer exist on the mail server, so will not be available from webmail or from any other computer. They will, however, be available on your Mac and will be searchable from within Apple Mail.
There are other ways to back up or archive your emails, but they have their disadvantages. For example, you can archive an entire mailbox by selecting Mailbox–>Archive Mailbox, but the archive will not be searchable or even viewable until you import it back into Apple Mail.
Now that you know how to move old emails to your local computer, it’s time for some spring cleaning. Before you start, though, be sure to delete any old emails that you truly don’t need. Good luck!
Related posts:
