Apple mail migration or archiving questions
I have a dilemma. Hopefully someone here can help me figure out or direct me how I should approach this.
Background:
My email service provider of 20+ years is transitioning their email host/server system over to Google. I am not sure how I feel about that. I have one set of email addresses for business and personal use which I purposely keep far far away from Google. I have a couple of other Gmail address that I created for spam crap and traps. Now that my service provider is joining up with Google for email service, I am concerned. They say they will seamlessly migrate all my email over, that they will maintain security and privacy policies, and nothing much for me to do in the process. My delimma is I do not want Google anywhere near some of my stuff. So this situation has me in a bit of conundrum about a path forward.
I use an iMac and use the Apple Mail program to manage all of my email accounts in one window/app on the Mac. Most all of the email exists on the servers (IMAP). One thought I have is to download or export all of the mail into a storage directory on my Mac. Then delete everything off of the email servers. My thinking being that when my provider does the migration to Google, the account will be empty and Google will not have any of my stuff. But what then? Will I be able to open the exported emails on my Mac? Will they still be organized and tagged and prioritized in the exported file, exactly as it was before?
My question is what to do or where to go next for an email service that is separate, secure, and has nothing to do with Google.
Thoughts? Comments?
iMac 27″, macOS 10.13
