Archiving Mailboxes

If your mail folders are getting a bit full with old email, you can quickly and easily archive messages into separate files. Select the mailbox folder from the left sidebar in Apple Mail and choose Mailbox, Archive Mailbox. This will create an mbox folder. You can then delete the mailbox folder from Mail. You can always use File, Import Mailboxes to bring the folder back into Mail. You can also open up the created mbox folder to reveal a “mbox” file which you can open in any text editor, even TextEdit, for a quick search of the messages. A good way to use this is to create a new folder, like “Archive 2008” and drag old messages to it. Then archive and delete that folder.