What are best practices for archiving mailboxes?

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Level 2

284 points

What are best practices for archiving mailboxes?

I am running Apple Mail in El Capitan on a Mac Pro 3,1, with several IMAP and POP accounts.

Before I delete large amounts of data, I am asking if there are any known possible problems I should beware of. The reason I have so much to delete is I have not done a large scale deletion since I started using Apple Mail in Mac OS 10.0 Chetah. That also means I have no experience in archiving and deleting mail. I do have enough general experience to understand wisdom of seeking advice before starting a project of deleting years of files. 😉

Some mailboxes I no longer use have thousands or tens of thousands of messages. I want to archive the messages for possible future reference, then delete the mailbox to reduce clutter. My guess is to first rebuild the mailbox to insure it is in good condition, then export and compress the mailbox.

Other mailboxes still in use have similar vast quantities of old messages. In this case I plan to archive the current mailbox, then delete massages older than year or two.

Any advice, warnings or other words of wisdom would be appreciated.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), MacPro 3,1 Accelsior PCIe SSD

Posted on Mar 18, 2018 10:42 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

158,208 points

Mar 18, 2018 11:17 AM in response to Tom Ritch

FWIW. I suggest that you try MailSteward. I have used this app over the years for archiving all of my Mail app mailboxes and have not had any issues retrieving any messages.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Mar 18, 2018 11:20 AM in response to Tom Ritch

You do have an Archive mailbox in which you can store all messages from the Inbox. There is an option in Mail's preferences to put deleted messages into Archive rather than in Trash. There are also several third-party products designed to archive mail in separate databases. A prominent one is called MailSteward.

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Answer 3

Tom Ritch Author

Level 2

284 points

Mar 18, 2018 2:13 PM in response to Kappy

Thanks Tesserax and Kappy. I was planning to remove and store old emails. You reminded me of the importance of being able to locate and retrieve old emails from an archive. What good would it be to store them and not know what was there? MailSteward looks like a good tool for indexing the archive. However I already have and am familiar with InfoClick, which indexes mail and I think probably will be sufficient for me.

More than reminding me of the need for an indexing tool, not hearing warnings of whatever unknown danger might lurk, is reassuring. I will proceed to archive, then pretty soon clean up my email by deleting the originals.

Thanks again.

Tom

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What are best practices for archiving mailboxes?

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