How can I Archive mail messages by year

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How can I Archive mail messages by year

Hello,

I have Mac OSX 10.11.3 - El Capitan, using Mail 9.2.

I store almost all of my emails in a multi branched tree under a root Mailbox named Saved Mail. I have been doing this now for over 6 years.

I would like to archive all emails for a given year in the same structure as they are sorted within my Saved Mail Directory tree structure.

My intent would be to near-offline these Archives on an external storage volume.

I don't care if it is viewable from the mail program directly or indirectly or not at all, but I do want all the content to be removed from my current Mail library so it does not take up space on my user disk.

I keep my System boot disk volume separate from my user's disk volume, so my Mail library is on a separate disk/volume which is known by the path /Users/<myname>/Library/Mail.

How can I make archives on different volume that would contain all emails received from Jan 1, 2015 to Dec 31, 2015 (and likewise for other past years) but still maintain the Mail box directory structure?

I have no problem if it would require a third party software add-on.

Thank you in advance.

Jeff Cameron

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Mar 22, 2016 7:58 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 25, 2017 1:49 PM in response to JeffCMKRNL

I don't think there is going to be something that does it exactly the way you describe and want but here are a few ideas to consider.

You can create a smart folder in Mail and use the date range as the criteria such that the smart results are for a specific individual year, you could then move the matching results to a real folder in Mail and you could then export that folder as an MBOX file, and then finally delete the folder from Mail itself. This approach would put all the messages in to a single folder so it would not keep them separate as Inbox, Sent, etc.

Note: If you move thousands of messages in one go it is possible this sudden massive workload might cause Mail and its communications with the server to 'struggle' especially if you continue to do other tasks in Mail while it is still processing this massive move. If you open the Activity window in Mail and wait for it to finish this task this is generally a good idea.

You could get a tool which automatically copies all emails to an external database. This database then can be searched and used offline with no access to the mail server and no need to re-import in to Mail. The database would typically also keep a record of which mailbox (folder) the message was in, optionally it can delete messages from mail at the same time as it stores them in the database. The are several such tools here are some to look at.

http://www.mothsoftware.com/

http://www.mailsteward.com

http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/

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