Archiving Mail

[frailer]

I have a shedload of emails at work that I prolly should delete, but would rather archive, in case there's a Federal Case about something down the track. Is there an easy way to do this, so that they are not clogging up current email precinct, yet readily accessible?

[Joe]

Using Apple Mail I assume? From the Mailbox menu.

[frailer]

Er...right.    :embarrassed:  So, is it then pretty accessible? Just sitting in a folder somewhere. And...select a bunch first, then choose Archive? or is it a Global Archive of the In/Out...?

[jezza]

Go to your home folder - library - mail -

In that folder you'll see loads of stuff. You could just back up the folder called mailboxes, that's what contains the messages in the various Inbox and sent mail .mbox files. Once you've backed up what you want, you can safely delete the messages in those folders.

Don't delete the folders themselves, they're the folders that appear in the sidebar of the Mail Application and there is no need to delete the files called info.plist

[frailer]

Thanks jez. Makes sense now.   :cool:

[jezza]

Oh yeah, just to be on the safe side, make sure you quit mail first if you're going for the mail boxes directly instead of Joes method

[Joe]

Er...right.    :embarrassed:  So, is it then pretty accessible? Just sitting in a folder somewhere. And...select a bunch first, then choose Archive? or is it a Global Archive of the In/Out...?

With either method you will have to import the whole mailbox back into mail to be able to see one or more. If you want to just save email for later viewing you can just do a Save As from the file menu and save either as .eml (raw source) files or .txt (Plain text) files or .rtf (Rich text) files. The you can always go back and open any file you want. The down side is naming them so they'll make sense and you can find them later on.

There is another app called Mail Steward that will save the messages into an SQL database and make search and retrieval very easy. From their site:

With a single click on the Archive button, MailSteward will archive all of the email in all of your Apple Mail accounts into a database for easy retrieval. One click and MailSteward will go to work storing copies of all your email text, HTML, attachments, and raw source, into a relational database. MailSteward has a wealth of features for importing, tagging, saving, and exporting, including the ability to export your vital email information in a number of standard data formats.

To really understand just how invaluable and easy to use MailSteward™ is, Download the free version of MailSteward or MailSteward Pro and try it out on your email. The free version is full-featured, but archives a maximum of 15,000 emails.

[Chilbear]

IF the  messages you are trying to save Frailer is REALLY important I suggest they get printed out just in case you cannot get them to reload in the future. Been there and done it. I have email still available in Entourage from 2003 but all the legal types have been printed to laser and stored out of the light.

[frailer]

Am absorbing all above. What about related attachments? Say you needed to access them? Our attachment limit's low, which may help.   :undecided:

Hmm...I note MailSteward takes care of that...The free trial will probably see me through, anyway.