How do I check if Time Machine on macOS Monterey is backing up my emails?

tamingdoom wrote:

How do i check if time machine is backing up my emails

It's a bit of a catch-22. What you've been told before is correct. Time Machine is backing up your e-mails. But the more important question is how you would restore those e-mails. The trick is that you actually can't. If you need to restore your system from backup, it will download all of your messages again from the server.

If you want to archive your messages locally, you can export them in mbox format. I recommend creating archive folders in the local "On my Mac" location. Then, move old e-mails into that folder. Then, export that folder in mbox format. Save the mbox files somewhere in your home directory. There, they will get backed up by Time Machine and you can restore them relatively easily using the "Import mbox" procedure.

Note: I'm not talking about Mail's "archive" function. I have no idea what that is supposed to do. I'm talking about manually creating local folders and rolling your own archive. It's a little bit of work, but you only need to do it once a year or so. I have most of my e-mail archived this way back to 1997.

Time Machine no longer directly backs up individual email messages from the Apple Mail app since macOS Catalina. However, it does back up the entire Mail folder, which contains your emails.

1. Time Machine backs up the entire ~/Library/Mail folder, which contains all your email data. This means your emails are included in the backup, but not as individual messages.

2. To check if Time Machine is backing up in general:

- Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.

- If you don't see the icon, go to Apple menu > System Settings > Control Centre, scroll to Time Machine, and select "Show in Menu Bar".

3. To verify your backups:

- Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.

- Press and hold the Option key, then choose "Verify Backups".

4. To check when the last backup occurred:

- Open System Settings

- Click on Time Machine

- Look for the "Latest Backup" information.

It's important to note that while your emails are being backed up as part of the Mail folder, you can't restore individual emails directly through the Time Machine interface like in previous macOS versions. If you need to restore emails, you would need to restore the entire Mail folder from a specific backup point.

If you accidentally deleted emails and need to restore them, you may need to restore the entire ~/Library/Mail folder from your Time Machine backup. This process will replace your current Mail folder with the one from the backup, potentially overwriting any new emails received since that backup was made.

For more granular control over email backups and restores, you might want to consider using a third-party backup solution specifically designed for email management.

Yes...

Does Time Machine back up your emails? I… - Apple Community

To check enter this in Finder>Goto Folder, then enter TM...

~/Library/Mail/

Use an app like mailSteward to back up your email