I am trying to archive ALL my emails which I have saved onto my iMac, into various folders and sub-folders. How do I archive the whole lot into one file that I can backup and store, and if needed, load back into Mail in order to find an old email. My iMac is running on the latest OSX El Capitan. I used to do this years ago in Windows, but can only see how to archive one email in Mail.
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Bente Andermahr
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How Do I Archive ALL My Emails In Folders On My iMac?
Comments: 2 Responses to “How Do I Archive ALL My Emails In Folders On My iMac?”
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You can try selecting the folder or folders you want to save, then choose Mailbox, Export Mailbox. This should create an mbox file, which is a standard format.
Of course, how well this works depends on how you have your email set up. There are so many different ways. For instance, I use IMAP-like email (Gmail, iCloud) so most of my email is in the cloud, not on one particular Mac. Not sure what would happen if I tried to archive the hundreds of thousands of email messages that are in the cloud -- I assume it would have to download them all first and then save them to a file that would be hundreds of GB in size. That would take a while, if it would work at all.
Then if I ever wanted to open up that box file to look for something it would take quite a while.
So if you are already using Gmail, why do this at all? Just leave all of your messages in Gmail. The power of it is its ability to store tons of email and search it all quickly.
Thanks Gary, this certainly does the trick when I expand all the folders, but as you say, it takes up a LOT of space. I will resist doing this as each of my mailboxes are IMAP, and I will just concentrate on the one or two folders that matter. Thanks for the quick response, and I love the info you continually offer.