Archiving/Backing up messages in Mail

Question

Archiving/Backing up messages in Mail

I know that so long as you save pref files and mail boxes etc one can be confident the data is saved and accessible. The problem with this is that if you wish to search for some email in the "archive" it means reverting Mail.app to that point in time when the back-up was made. It rather messes up the "up-to-date" set-up of Mail!

I would like to have a way of storing my emails for posterity in a form I can access without having to disturb Mail. My best solution so far is iData2 which will import Mail's emails and store them in a data base. Works quite well actually but its sorting can't handle threading etc.

Ideally I want an app that can look at Mail's mbox folders and handle them, sort, display etc just like Mail does. I want to be able to say "open zxzx.mbox" and look/read/search the emails contained in zxzx.mbox.

I also would feel better if the format used is pretty basic/simple so that software in ten years time wont have trouble accessing the data!

Any suggestions?
(There has to be a way! do folk not want to keep their mail even if its years old?)

iMac flat panel 1GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on Jun 12, 2006 9:33 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 12, 2006 2:17 PM in response to Thomas O'Carroll

do folk not want to keep their mail even if its years old?

Yes, and most of us do so by creating custom "On My Mac" mailboxes within Mail itself, which makes me wonder what it really is the problem you're trying to solve...

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Answer 2

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jun 12, 2006 5:21 PM in response to Thomas O'Carroll

What email service are you using, dot mac?

All you have to do is create folders On My Mac and drag any emails over to it and it will be deleted off the server and stored on that computer, then you can search each mail box individually. And you can make lots of them, I don't know what the limit is, and you can use any criteria, I sort mine by company and individuals and group mail. But you can do it by date or any other criteria you want.

Also you can create Smart Folders and set up lots of different criteria, for instance, Joe Blow's emails from 5/10 to 6/10. Set up as many of these as you want with lots of overlapping criteria. The mail is not moved from the server, merely kept as a search in the Smart folder.

But you can have them moved as well, create folders either on the the server or on your Mac then set up Rules in Preferences You can sort it by address, date, etc. So two options, one that moves the emails and one that leaves them in place but keeps lists of them.

You can also have them move automatically from your server to a mailbox on your Mac (which deletes them from the server) with rules to move everything over 2 weeks or any amount of time you want. Remember though, that anything moved to On My Mac will not be available if you access mail from another computer because theya republican deleted from the server.

What I do is have 5 mailboxes on my .mac account on my server, so mail is coordinated between work and home, with all mail pertaining to three clients and one email list going to those folders, with the fifth my main mail box for everything left over, it's like having 5 separate email accounts. I've also installed Dockstar so each of those accounts has it's own little icon and color on the Mail Dock icon so I know how many mails I have for each mailbox.

For storage I just drag mail over to another set of mailboxes On My Mac when I feel they've sat long enough, I don't like those things to be automatic.

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Answer 3

Jun 13, 2006 2:41 PM in response to Kevin Horn

David G.G.
well like "most of you" that is exactly what I do, to organise my emails.

Kevin Horn,
Thanks for the suggestions but I use POP email, not dot mac (or similar). To check and read email I download all emails from my ISP mail server. My email is stored on my computer not a remote server.

I am an active member of an email based forum which results in large quantities of mail over time, and as I work from home my work emails mount up very quickly. I currently try and keep about 2 months worth of mail in my active mail boxes (as in, the ones that email downloads to), transferring older stuff to "archive email" type mail boxes from time to time. having too much mail in the Inbox results in Mail "slow-downs". keeping a couple of years worth of mail, even when sorted out into separate mail boxes results in very sluggish searches and can be frustrating when just searching for a recent email last week. (yes I know I could filter by date etc)

I would like to store older emails either on cd/dvd or external drive (or both),
(and backing up data is, as you know, vital) but be able to access those emails without having to mess-up Mail.

We all know how quickly our hard disks get full and my 80GB internal drive needs some free space. I don't see the point of storing such stuff permanently on my "working drive". Some of my Mail dates back 6 years or more and all in all is now occupying quite a few GB of disk space - even more than my pics in iPhoto!

So as I said I'd like to back up my mail to some disk, but still be able to access it in a Mail.app like manner if I need to. I just don't want to have to bring it all back into the Library folder etc. and mess up the current state of Mail.

I'm wondering if there is something I can do with aliases... make an alias of an Mbox from a DVD and place in the appropriate place in Library->mail folder. Launch Mail and access the mail box. once done, delete that mail box. Its not ideal though and a bit of a faff, even if this would work.

Any other suggestions or comments?

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Answer 4

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jun 13, 2006 3:14 PM in response to Thomas O'Carroll

So as I said I'd like to back up my mail to some
disk, but still be able to access it in a Mail.app
like manner if I need to. I just don't want to have
to bring it all back into the Library folder etc. and
mess up the current state of Mail.

Hmmm, good question, I don't know.

Some quick searching came up with this:

http://www.mailsteward.com/

Give it a try if it looks good.

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Answer 5

Jun 13, 2006 5:32 PM in response to Thomas O'Carroll

There are two problems here. One is Mail becoming sluggish and the other is the Mail database becoming too big. It seems natural to think that the performance problem is a consequence of the size problem, but it doesn't have to. It could be that the index needs to be rebuilt, for example, so you may want to try this first:

1. Quit Mail.

2. In the Finder, go to HOME/Library/Mail/. Make a backup copy of this folder, just in case something goes wrong -- e.g. by dragging it to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down.

3. Locate the Envelope Index file and move it to the Trash.

4. Launch Mail again and proceed to re-create the index -- Mail says it's "importing", but it just re-creates Envelope Index if the mailboxes are already in Mail 2.0 format.

If re-creating the index solves the performance problem, then you know that Mail is perfectly capable of handling your needs, and you just need to find a way to move part of your mail out of the internal HD to solve the size problem.

Mail doesn't recognize Finder aliases, but you can use Unix symbolic links instead. See the following post for instructions to move the entire Mail database to another disk. The same idea can be applied to any folder within HOME/Library/Mail/ (e.g. Mailboxes) if you don't want to move the entire Mail folder. Let me know whether you want more specific instructions to accomplish what you want:

Re: Move mailboxes to another disk volume?

Note, however, that Mail would still keep a single Envelope Index for all your mail, so performance won't improve by moving part of your mail to another disk; this addresses the size problem only.

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Answer 6

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jun 14, 2006 12:33 PM in response to Thomas O'Carroll

Thomas:

Now that you've brought this up I've been looking into this and it seems very weird that there is no good way to do this, then be able to read and search the archives. Mail Steward looks good but it's $49 and the simplest solution would be to just drag and drop the mailboxes to a CD or DVD and burn it, then be able to read it in Mail or something like it. I don't need to archive yet but will someday I will so I want to solve this.

But I can't find any program that will read Mail mailboxes except Mail. Since I have Thunderbird I thought I could import Mail from another location so Thunderbird would be used exclusively for archives, but it won't read Mac Mail.

Simplest solution is this: Get an external hard drive and install a system on it. I have one specifically just to run Disk Warrior, but I can copy all my mailboxes over to Mail on that computer and have that version of Mail read those, sort of one current Mail and one archive Mail. But you'd have to boot up off the external to use the other Mail, so still a hassle.

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Answer 7

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jun 14, 2006 5:37 PM in response to Kevin Horn

Here's another one that looks good since you can read archived email and is a bit cheaper:

http://www.mothsoftware.com/ma_1.html

You could also sign up for a free Gmail and forward mail over there then delete it from Mail. Would be a one at a time thing, though. One good feature is Gmail groups things by threads, it calls it conversations, so you can group together what you want by what you write in the subject.

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Answer 8

Jul 20, 2006 8:53 AM in response to Kevin Horn

Hi, I don't know if you are still thinking about this, but it's certainly an issue I have had for many years. As a self employed writer, I can get a 100 emails in a day, all of which contain useful info that I may want to refer back to. I also don't like to leave all that info in my inbox, 'cause, let's face it, it's just too easy to delete something without thinking. My strategy has been to think of filing like the days when we shoved bits of paper in a folder. So I save each email individually in a folder under name, to or from and date. This is hideously time consuming, but it works. Has anyone ever come across a programme that would do that? I half suspect Automator could, but I'm not confident enough to try that. Any suggestions?

PowerMac G5 & G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

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Answer 9

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jul 20, 2006 9:59 AM in response to Beth Tierney

In Mail Preferences you can set up Rules. It's actually very simple, just choose from pop up menus, so that each email can go to it's own folder automatically as it comes in. You can even set it up for the folders to stay on the server or be downloaded to your Mac (if you are using .mac). I have 5 set up, 3 for clients, my main mail, one for an email group I'm on and another just for Apple Discussions. And I have DockStar which allows me to put 5 different icons on the Mail Dock icon, so all five have their own color, position and shape on the Dock Mail icon so I know immediately which mail box has mail. It's like having 5 different accounts in one. You can do more than 5 but DockStar can only do 5 icons.

You might want to check out some other mail clients that might have more features such as PowerMail, Mailsmith or Eudora. All are expensive, though, Powermail running around $99.

Gmail offers lots of nice features and 2.7 gigs of storage space and growing. And is totally free. You can even have mail from another account forwarded to Gmail for storage. You can also choose any email (or several) and instantly archive it in the Gmail storage, getting it out of your inbox. Gmail sorts by subjects, so everything on one thread is put in it's own folder which keeps it simpler, but I don't like that feature very much.

Kevin

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Answer 10

Jul 20, 2006 10:30 AM in response to Kevin Horn

Yes, I thought through the rules to seperate folders option, but it's getting things out of Mail and then archived. I'm not sure how good the rules/folders thing would be as I would have 70 ?? mailbox folders running down the side of Mail. But if I do that, how do I back up each mailbox? Thanks.

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Answer 11

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jul 20, 2006 11:06 AM in response to Beth Tierney

Wow! 70 folders! That's a lot. There were two archive programs mentioned in this discussion:

http://www.mothsoftware.com/ma_1.html

http://www.mailsteward.com/

Mail Steward is the one that gets recommended in articles, runs around $50, though. You might go to MacUpdate and do a search for Mail Archive and see what comes up.

I know there is also a free set of Apple scripts for mail as well but I can't remember the name.

Other than that you should be able to just drag the folders to a hard drive or CD, although I think you need to do that with the folders in user/Library/Mail.

You might be able to create Rules (or possibly an Automator action) to forward whole folders to a Gmail account and let them be stored online over there where they are easily searchable and not using up your disk space. Once you know they are in Gmail just delete them all. Or one that sends forwards mails past a certain date then delete it. That always seemed like a good idea to me. All would be still be easily readable and searchable just as if they were regular emails, just removed from you hard drive.

Kevin

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Answer 12

Jul 20, 2006 7:59 PM in response to Kevin Horn

http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Mail_Scripts.html#Tiger
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/email_chat/mailscripts.html

Here are some Apple Mail scripts that might help out.

Also, here are some plug-ins.
http://www.tikouka.net/mailapp/
and if you want to export your Apple main to Thunderbird, check this out:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060706201156481

Good luck!

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Answer 13

Jul 20, 2006 8:03 PM in response to Jonathan Cost

Oh, I also found this really good script to convert to a standard mbox file.
http://vengefulcow.com/emlx2mbox/

Check it out.

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Answer 14

Kevin Horn

Level 4

1,836 points

Jul 20, 2006 8:59 PM in response to Jonathan Cost

The Apple Scripts were what I was thinking of, thanks for the link. Now that I look at it again that might be a good way to go. Old mail can be moved to different forms for different apps. I could make Thunderbird my archive app so all mail will still be searchable and readable, or put it in a note program database. And it could be set up to do it at certain times, like whenever an email gets 6 months old.

I still like the idea of automatically forwarding old mail to my Gmail account for storage. Then space is saved on my hard drive.

Kevin

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Answer 15

Jul 21, 2006 4:49 AM in response to Kevin Horn

Hi all, I think I'm going to give MailScripts a try. I already have all my emails on a permanent divert to a Yahoo account. That's great way to keep a copy especially for travel and when the server goes down. But deep dowm, I'm old fashioned and I just want to have all those pieces of virtual paper in a virtual filing cabinet. Converted to txt files is probably best... so I'll see how that goes and feedback in case someone else finds it useful too. Wishing you all a good weekend.

PowerMac G5 & G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

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