Want to highlight a helpful answer? Upvote!
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Recently my Mac Mail asked if I wanted to archive old mail items for the first time (it's a fairly new Mac). I clicked yes before realising I didn't know where to retrieve them. I hadn't set up a folder anywhere - I have now but of course it's empty. Any idea where my old mail has been sent?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Hi, not on 10.6.8 at the moment, but look in your Documents folder, that is where mine chose to go in 10.5.8.
Not there :-(
When I Archived mine manually, I just had the inbox for one account highlighted & it put an INBOX.mbox folder in Documents, with these 2 files in it...
table_of_contents
mbox
So maybe search for table_of_contents, or .mbox
I won't be on 10.6.8 for about 12 hours, so hopefully we get more help in here.
Or maybe choose Import in Mail & see if it gives clues as to parh or what it's called
I found 2 folders table_of_contents and .mbox but the files were in html text code and unreadable. Import in Mail takes me to the folder I just created which I put on my desktop which is empty.
I found 2 folders table_of_contents
Reveal those in the finder to find their path or location.
It led to the folder I created today.
So Finder shows the files there, but Mail Import shows nothing in there>
Hmmmm, try the Archive one more time & see if things change.
Not sure what you meany by try the archive again but nothing has changed when I look in the folder.
OK, finally remembered to try 10.6...
When you choose a Folder/account to Archive, check the path stated & click on that dropdown, what is the full path?
Also, what size are those two files? Highlight them & do a Get Info on them.
The folders go into My Documents. There are 2 now, one I created this morning and one I made on the 5th Nov. The one I created this morning is empty. The first mbox is 83.4 MB and the table of contents is 78KB, neither of which I can open in a readable format.
OK Helen, they aren't really readable/usable outside of the Mail App, they are meant as a backup, or way to transfer that particular Mailbox to another Mac.
To use them in Mail's menu>File>Import Mailboxes>Mail for OSX>Continue, it'll open a file dialog to choose that Inbox.mbox or whatever you've archived like Sent Messages.mbox, it imports them to new folders.
The Archive feature seems useless to me if you want to safely back up, archive, messages or mailboxes.
With Mavericks when I Archive a mailbox edits to either the source mailbox or to the Archive versions result in changes to the other.
It behaves as an alias of a folder or directory in the finder would, if you were editing the folder's contents.
So, I am doing this now and this might change, what I am doing is creating a workflow in automator to Export a mailbox, am giong to try a smart mailbox first, to a directory in Dropbox to be triggered when I receive an email from the snake whose emails I want a record of.
That way although they will over write, I think unless I can get them sequentially named, Dropbox will keep a copy of each through time.
So the Archive feature in Mail is not implemented properly or shoud be renamed to be Useless Alias of Mailbox
Where do Archived mails in Mac Mail go before I set up a folder?
