Where do the "Mailboxes" for Apple's "Mail" program reside on my hard drive?

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Level 2

244 points

Where do the "Mailboxes" for Apple's "Mail" program reside on my hard drive?

Using Mail v. 4.4 on a MacBook Pro running 10.6.5.

On the sidebar of any Mail window is a list of "mailboxes," in my case containing lots of old emails classified according to various categories.

But where on my hard drive do these "mailboxes" reside? The data exists on my computer, not online anywhere -- even when I'm not on the Internet, the mailboxes and their contents are still there.

I've tried searching my hard drive (Command-F in Finder), looking for the the names of each mailbox, and also looking for unique/unusual words contained in various emails while searching for "contents," and also tried searching for visible and invisible (and both) files while doing this, but all searches came up empty,

I also tried looking in the "package contents" of the Mail program's application file, but could not locate the mailboxes there either.

They must be somewhere on my hard drive -- but where?

Any help or clues would be much appreciated.

15" MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Jan 13, 2013 9:27 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tuffy Nicolas Author

Level 2

244 points

Jan 13, 2013 10:23 PM in response to Tuffy Nicolas

I think I just solved my own problem -- after futher searching, I seem to have found Mail's mailboxes in:

users/[account]/Library/Mail/mailboxes

But what I still don't understand is why none of these files nor their contents are "findable" using the Search function in Finder. Is there some search criteria I need to turn on or off in order to find "behind-the-scenes" files like these (in the future, should a similar problem ever crop up)? They're not "invisible," they're not inside some "package contents," their names don't start with a dot, they don't have weird file extensions, they're not corrupted -- so why couldn't they be found through a Finder search? Are files inside the "Library" and the "System" excluded from Finder searches?

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Answer 2

cperezp

Level 1

0 points

May 8, 2015 2:53 AM in response to Tuffy Nicolas

I have been looking for an answer on this matter for quite a long time, so I'm glad I found an answer. Thank you.

The thing is, I don´t know how to access the path you talk about (users/[account]/Library/Mail/mailboxes) 😕 if you cannot use the "Finder".

And another question is: Do you know if all these mails could be storage in a server/cloud or somewhere not locally?

Thank you.

Cristina

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