Mail: Where are email messages and address book saved?

Question

Bruce A Author

Level 3

698 points

Mail: Where are email messages and address book saved?

Good morning.

I would like to backup both emails and the address book in Mail.

Where are these located on my harddrive?

Thanks for your time.

PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.5.8), G4 1.67 mHz 15" A1138 aluminum

Posted on Feb 21, 2014 9:01 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

239,363 points

Feb 21, 2014 11:10 AM in response to Bruce A

Hi Again Bruce,

On Mail...

First Quit Mail, then I'd backup these two Mail folders, by right clicking on them in the Finder, then choose Archive/Compress.

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail Downloads

(Could be a different folder here if you chose such in Mail Prefs)

Right click on that Mail folder, choose archive, you'll get everything in the folder, and the folder itself in a file called Mail.zip, move it to a safe place, same for the Mail Downloads folder... only the plist is separate.

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

For Address Book, quit AB...

Files...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist

Folders...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/

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