3/5/20
9:00 am

Better Ways To Organize Important Email Messages On Your Mac

Many people archive important email to mailboxes or folders inside the Mac Mail app. But this may not be the best way to save important messages. Instead, export them as files so they exist in the Finder and you can name them, organize them, and archive them as you wish.

Check out Better Ways To Organize Important Email Messages On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you a better way to save important email messages.
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So all too often I hear people saving important email messages to special mailboxes or folders inside of the Mail app. I don't think this is the best place to save important emails or even not so important emails that you want to refer to once in awhile. A better way to do it is to save them as files. You'll have more control over files saved to your hard drive than you do to email saved in the Mail app. This is because typically email is caught inbetween being on your computer and being on the email service that you use. Email services all work a little different. iCloud is a little different than gmail, is different that Yahoo and is different than your local ISP. You can choose to get email in different ways. Syncing with the server using something like iMap or downloading everything using POP. Then your email is only available on your Mac. You can't view it on other devices. 
Then I hear of people upgrading or changing their email service or changing the app they use and then loosing the email that they've carefully curated and put in certain places in the Mail app. When I get an important email I don't keep it in the Mail app. I export it and save it as a file. I have a lot of control over my files. I can organize them in folders. I could put them in the Cloud and view them across devices. I can choose from several different ways of exporting email and save the message in an appropriate way. Let's look at the different ways you can export email from the Mail app and how easy it is. Then how you can organize your important messages this way rather than inside of Mail.
I have a bunch of examples here for us to look at from email with just some basic text information to some email with complex images and layout. Some receipts and an email with some very important information in a complex layout that you definitely want to save as is. Now there are basically three different ways to export messages from Mail. If you go to File, Save As, you'll see three of those. The first one is Raw Message Source which sounds like it's really techy and not very useful. But it, in fact, saves things out in a .eml format. Standard format. By default that will open back up in Mail and display the email just as it was originally looked. It's exactly the same as saving it in a mailbox in Mail and then viewing it again except that you have a separate file that you control that sits on your hard drive instead of buried deep down in some sort of email library. 
You can also export in Rich Text Format which will strip out some more complex layout and other elements. These can be viewed in just about any app that views text. For instance you can use TextEdit to view these. Third you've got Plain Text which will strip out images and any layout and keep just the text information. So if you have a message that just has plain text in it this is the most compact and most compatible format for you to save out of it.
Now the fourth option is to go to File and Export as PDF. When you do that you get a PDF file and that can be opened in Preview or any PDF reader and will attempt to keep all of the layout and design and images and everything in the email. However because email uses HTML and HTML prints different than what is seen on the screen you're not always going to get the same look. As a matter of fact a lot of important emails come with a different design for printing than for viewing on the screen so when you go to print it you see something that looks better on paper. Well saving as a PDF is actually going to get you that printed version which may not be what you want. You also could get a PDF by going to File, Print and then selecting PDF here. The results will more or less be the same as exporting as PDF.
So let's look and see how this works in practice. Here we have in the Finder my Documents folder and I have all sorts of folders for organizing all of my stuff. I have some folders that are very useful for storing some of these saved emails. So, for instance, I have a saved email folder. Let's go and save this very simple email to that. I could go to File, Save As and since this is just text I could say Plain Text and let me save that to this saved email folder here. I'll just drag that into the location. Hit Save and I'll get this email here saved as text. If I double click it it'll open up in TextEdit and you can see plain text here is just what's in there. So any graphics would have been stripped out. But for this email it's probably fine.
The advantage to saving it that was is that I can view it very easily without opening it up in Mail again. I don't even have to have Mail running. Now I can also try Save As but I'm going to change the format to Rich Text Format and I'll save it out. Now I'm going to get a RTF file. When I open that in TextEdit it looks a little bit nicer. The links are clickable. It's going to keep formatting bold text and things like that and the file size really isn't going to be that much larger. So this is probably a better option. 
Now if I save it out as a Raw Message Source it's going to save  as .eml. Now I don't actually need to go and use that menu command for that. I can just drag and drop. If I drag and drop this over there it will save out the .eml automatically. So now I get an eml file. The eml file, when I double click it, actually opens up in Mail and recreates the email just as I originally saw it. Better yet it will open up in other email apps as well. So if in the future you're not using Mac Mail at all, maybe you're not even using a Mac, eml files should still open up in whatever app you're using. For instance I could open this up in Thunderbird or something.
Now let's look at this more complex email here. If I try to save this out as plain text obviously I'm not going to get very much. If I look at it here you can see this is what it looks like. If I save it out as Rich Text Format it will look a little bit nicer but still nothing like the original email. If I save it out as Raw Message Source or simply drag and drop it then I'll get this eml file. If I double click on that it looks exactly like the original. Now I can also go and Export as a PDF. If I do that I get a PDF file that will open up in Preview not in Mail and in this case it looks pretty good. But other email messages may not look as good. So you should definitely test when you do an export in PDF to see what the result is. 
So now you see the different ways you can export from Mail. Organization is the next step. So I have a saved email folder here. That may not be the best way to do it. A better way to do it would be to have folders for important things like say receipts. So if I have a receipt, like say this one here, I can easily drag and drop that in there and I'll get the receipt saved as an eml file. I can open it up whenever I want and view it in Mail. Likewise I have a travel plans folder and for this airline itinerary it's useful to drag that out and save that as an eml file. This may be a good use of exporting as a PDF because then I can open that up easily in anything and view it very quickly with QuickLook even.
Now a few things to note. EML seems to be the ideal format for saving email messages. But you run into a problem with trying to view them on your iPhone or iPad. You can't look at those eml files. They just appear as data files and you can't see inside them. However if you search the iOS app store you can find some good apps that will allow you to view eml messages. But this is one good reason to go to PDF's for important things like travel documents because you can easily view them on your iPhone and iPad and your Mac's. If you have to forward them to somebody or view them on somebody else's device it's easy to view a PDF like that. But keep in mind you can store things as eml files and then easily open them up and export them as a PDF if you need to in the future. 
Also note that you can get a lot better with your organization than this simple example that I showed you. You could have all sorts of subfolders to save different types of email. You can name the files whatever you want so that will help in searching for things and identifying what the message is before you even look at it. You can also use all sorts of other finder tricks such as tags to help organize your email files. This is also great for archiving and backing up these important email messages. You can clearly see that they're backed up. You can easily drag and drop them to an archived drive and see that you have them. 
So there are a lot of good reasons for adapting this kind of strategy for saving your important emails rather than leaving them in the Mail app.

Comments: 29 Responses to “Better Ways To Organize Important Email Messages On Your Mac”

Tim A

4 months ago

Another great tutorial. It happened very quickly but caught how you dragged a file icon from a Finder List view to assert the Save location.
A suggestion would be to list the file sizes for the resulting .eml, .pdf, .rtf, and .txt choices of your sample email Save.

Charlie Johnson

4 months ago

Gary
I have literally thousands of emails in hundreds of folders in Apple Mail. I have been living with AM’s shortcomings for years. After watching your video I would like to move these emails and folders from AM to DropBox. Can I move an entire folder full of emails at one time or does each individual email have to be moved?

TheTrainRev

4 months ago

Gary – thanks for this!

That being said, is there a way to change the “Subject” field and then save the message in a mail folder?

Thanks

Nick

4 months ago

Great suggestions Gary. Just what I’ve been looking for, I’ve followed your suggestions on filing emails in the past, and this video goes into more detail. I will start moving emails off the servers onto my drive as soon as I do a few tests on using various file types. – thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Charlie: Select multiple messages, drag and drop. Try it.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

TheTrainRev: Change the subject in an email you have received? No, not easily.

Linda Taylor

4 months ago

Great reminder to me as now I can remove most of my saved messages from the server and avoid getting the warning that I’m almost out of space! I knew this was possible, but had filed it away in my memory and forgot to retrieve it to utilize! Those important messages will now find a new home on my external drive thanks to you, Gary!!!

Caroline

4 months ago

Brilliant! Have straight away shifted a bunch of emails that I’ve kept in Mail folders into sub-folders in my Documents folder. And from now on I’ll be triaging them as and when they arrive, so that the important ones can go into appropriate folders right away, while the ‘original’ emails can then be deleted. Thanks, Gary, for another total winner of a tutorial! 👍🏻

Peter Hall

4 months ago

I use mail so no problem but my wife uses gmail not thru the mail app. When I tried to move messages from gmail didn’t work. When I did save to I got different options and when I used them and went to open the file, I got an error message stating that gmail was busy. Is there a way without using Mail?

David Girling

4 months ago

I will certainly follow your advice and will in future save important emails as pdf files and put them in subject folders on my Mac. Currently all the emails I keep are in subject and sub-subject mail boxes in Mail and also in iCloud. But on my iPhone and iPad, the sub- and sub-sub etc. mailboxes appear full expanded and I cannot find a way of contracting them back into each main subject mail box. On my iPhone this means one hell of a lot of scrolling. Is there a way of doing this on iPhone?

Gene

4 months ago

Another great video and highly functional. I have been using flags to track important emails. No more. This makes so much sense.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Peter: I just tried going to the Gmail website and just by using the Download function I was able to download the message, get a .eml file, and that file opened nicely in the Mail app when I double-clicked it. Try it.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

David: Your only option is to cut down on the number of subfolders you are using.

Geoff Charlesworth

4 months ago

Hi Gary, Tried saving as .EML but when I open the file it tries to open in Microsoft Outlook and not Mail which is where it originated and where I’d prefer it to open. I have a copy of Outlook on my iMac for work purposes.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Geoff: Sounds like you have simply installed Outlook and given it permission to be the default app for handling email messages. Either set the default to Mail, or drag and drop on to Mail, or Control+click and select Open With.

Brett

4 months ago

Thanks Gary! Another quick and more powerful alternative is using Devonthink’s Mac Mail Plug-in – not only can you decide which format you want (eml, rtf, txt, pdf,) Devothink’s built-in OCR works nicely for PDF’s. Devonthink is also automation friendly and support/develop scripts for you (as part of your license) friendly. Devonthink also allows you to convert from one file type to another. Devonthink also has a feature so you can select a mailbox and import to save an encrypted database.

Fran

4 months ago

Thank you for this long awaited information. I’d like to see more videos on effective use of the Mail app.. and searching for saved emails.
ALSO, what APPs do you recommend to view elm files on the iPhone and iPad? Thank you so very much for your very useful videos.

Fran

4 months ago

I dragged some emails to a folder on my computer but it did not show it as an eml file. I checked it using control I . ??

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Fran: I don’t have a specific recommendation for an iOS app. You can pick one. If the files didn’t show as eml, what did they show up as?

Vik

4 months ago

I upload my emails to Evernote from there I can tag and search as required. Gmail also has plugins to connect from the web UI to directly export to Evernote.

Ian Leckie

4 months ago

Hi Gary! Great, very useful, I didn´t know this, and have just been regularly exporting mailboxes to the Finder. When I drag a bunch of mails to a folder I get the .eml format, good for using Quick Look or double-clicking and opening up in Mail. But unless I´m missing something Finder won´t let me sort these .eml files the same way I can in Mail, i.e. newest or oldest mail first. Can I get the Finder to sort like in Mail? I haven’t found a way! Thanks, regards, Ian.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Ian: Right, there is no way for the Finder to know the dates of the messages since that is just internal data in those files. So it can sort by name, but not the message date.

Bill LeDrew

4 months ago

I loved this video. I started by moving emails from one folder. I didn’t realize that the folder contained over 13,000 emails. After I had moved about 1/3 of them, it would let me put any more in that folder. I suspect, but don’t remember from the past if there is a limit. Any suggestions? I’m a very long time follower. Bill

YvonneinSonoma

4 months ago

I’ve been watching you for years but this was the best one ever. I immediately cleaned out all my folders and sub-folders in Mail by exporting them to Evernote. Since Catalina, Apple Mail has been unavailable on Time Machine backups and this is a much better way to organize, archive, and search my mail messages. Thank you!

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Bill: Limit? Any limit would be set by your email service, not the Mac mail app.

Bill LeDrew

4 months ago

Thanks. Then I’m not sure why it wouldn’t let me drag any more into the folder. I’ll keep fiddling with it as it’s a great idea. I have emails all the way back to 2002 that I’ve been saving.

Ian Leckie

4 months ago

Thanks for replying, Gary! What I´ll now do is just drag and drop REALLY important mails that I can´t afford to lose and need to refer to. There aren´t too many of these, and it´s easy enough to change their names to get Finder to sort the way I want it to!

itasara

4 months ago

I usually drag mail I want to save onto my desktop.I don’t remember ever seeing the .eml signature.
My question is, if you do drag the mail out and it does become .eml what happens if you want to erase all that mail you saved in your mail app? I have so many emails everyday and sometime I just go thru them and delete en masse. But if I save some on my desktop or some other folder, they won’t disappear if I erase them in mail, right? I know pdf won’t and text saves won’t, but what about .eml?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

itasara: Perhaps you simply have “show all file extensions” turned off in Finder Preferences, so you are not seeing the .eml at the end. When you export mail like that, you are creating a copy. If you delete a message in Mail, it won’t affect those files. Try it with one to see.

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Better Ways To Organize Important Email Messages On Your Mac

Comments: 29 Responses to “Better Ways To Organize Important Email Messages On Your Mac”

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