Comments on: Archiving Old Emails in Apple Mail

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:42:20 +0000

For anyone interested, after creating the ‘On My Mac’ mailbox, you can drag & drop folders from the IMAP mailbox into the new one. This copies the messages instead of moving them. It’s also a lot faster if you have multiple folders!

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:40:49 +0000

Sam – I’m pretty sure they’re stored in ~/Library/Mail, but they’re hidden. Try enabling hidden files to find out for sure: http://www.techiecorner.com/153/how-to-show-hidden-files-in-finder-mac-os-x/

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:22:20 +0000

Hi Tony! Wondering if you may be the gate keeper to a seemingly simple answer to a seemingly simple question: once you create a local mailbox, where is all of that mail stored on your machine?

Following this, just switched mail servers & brought everything from the old account onto my computer (using Mac Mail) before switching over to the new server to ensure would still have all of that email + it would be searchable. Wanting to back it all up to an external hard drive, and am doing an archive export of that now. Is that all I need to do, or do I need to find where all of it is saved on my machine and copy that? (which is how this pertains to the first question)

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:41:39 +0000

Hi Angie, Technically, all messages *should* come into your Mac that are coming into webmail. Have you checked to see if you have any filters/rules set up that may be forcing some messages to skip the inbox? Also, have you checked the spam/junk folder to see if some messages are ending up there? Finally, syncing the mailbox is probably a good idea…

By: Angie Hayes

Angie Hayes — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:36:55 +0000

Hello Tony! Amazing tip, exactly what I needed! Although I think my mailbox was so full that I was having problems connecting via smtp and so although I have moved a ton of messages successfully to my mac – (thanks to you :) ) I am
still having issues of not all messages coming into apple mail that come in to webmail. Do you think because my connection was messed up that the actual mail on the server is still causing the issues regardless of the move? I was going to sync the mailbox and maybe that fixes the problem, but I was worried that it’s not the right thing to do. So sorry to bug you with this, would love your thoughts if you have any insight,x millions of thank you’s, Angie

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:33:18 +0000

Nice tip indeed, thanks..

By: Carol Maker

Carol Maker — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 03:39:01 +0000

That simple? Thanks!

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:37:16 +0000

Carol –

I believe all you have to do is use File–>Import Mailboxes to import your archive.

By: Carol Maker

Carol Maker — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:21:56 +0000

Tony, I want to move some emails from an archive file back to Mail, but I can’t figure it out.

Can you help?

I am doing this because I want to bulk “forward” to a CRM (customer relations management) system with a “maildrop” function so I’ll have all the history of my customers.

By: miguel

miguel — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:52:42 +0000

nice mail tips!

would like when apple timemachine did make permanent backups but if the backup disc is full it starts to overwrite the old files again. so its not the perfect solution :)

i use also gmail for backup but i dont like when gmail is trying to go into facebook direction and wants to connect people- privacy is king- zuckerberg is wrong :)