Attachments missing from Mailbox Export - mbox file

After reporting this to Apple Support this has been escalated to the Engineering team.

So it appears that this is a bug in the Version 11.2 (3445.5.20) as checking with others who have an older version of Apple Mail 10.2 the export does indeed work and does indeed include attachments with the emails into the exported .mbox file.

So with Version 11.2 no dice until the run a patch to fix this. 😟

That's interesting.

What I was expecting was pdfs, excel, etc. Also .png files that are embeded in messages (for example lots of screenshots and what not). This email is from an really Gmail inbox that I stored locally as a backup (I left messages on the server). I don't use that email anymore but I still have the backup.

It takes up alot of space on my local machine and I wanted to reupload it back to a Gmail address.

I've been using this python script that works really well. The only problem is no attachments.

The Apple Support Engineers said that they Export Mailbox should have attachments so they are looking at disk images to see if this is indeed a bug.

FWIW the attachments export in previous versions of Apple Mail just fine. Also, its just odd to me that Google doesn't support uploads anymore, they do for outlook but not for Thunderbird or Apple Mail. I get that far less people use those email clients but it seems silly not to make it easier to use Google products.

When I go directly into the Apple Mail Library folder the attachments in all the format glory are still there .pdf, .png . xls and so on. So it's weird that an .mbox export would lose that info.

Yeah I understand. That the files were encoded was what I thought was the issue at first but it appears that its an Apple Mail design flaw.

The Support Engineers just got back to me after looking at a couple of my disk images. It turns out this is intentional for some reason (though not entirely sure about that).

It looks like this is an apple issue. Namely, when I create a fresh mailbox and try and transfer a message to that new apple mail mailbox Apple Mail alerts that the connected email account is offline. (recall this mail was downloaded to the local client as a back up and is no longer connected to the email account that it once was).

So it appears that because the email account isn't actually connected to a "live email". Apple Mail can't attach the attachments to the .mbox file upon export even though, the attachements live on the local machine in Apple Mails own mailbox file architecture as full files.

I'm checking with some colleagues who have older versions of Apple Mail to see if the email accounts they have are connected to an actual webmail or other email account.

If that is the missing link then its on apple mail to fix. If indeed, one has to have a connected live email account, then its by design that Apple Mail prohibits the creation of an .mbox file will full attachments and just creates the messages.

Which seems silly, so maybe I can get them to fix that. It shouldn't matter if an account is live or not, all the email files and attachments live on the local client. It appears that its just a matter of Apple Mail ensuring that regardless of being connected they can export to an .mbox fully with the attachments (encoded or otherwise). The whole thing is really strange. Email is such an old protocol and I am sure Apple wants to focus on numerous other software aspects than silly old Apple Mail though. 😝