Need the brain trust to help: I have 20 years worth of emails–mostly on Apple Mail app. My email is mainly IMAP stuff that I transferred to my Macs over the years. Now I am seeking a great way to transfer all these emails (don’t ask–tens of thousands) to one drive so I can search for historically important documents. I tried apps that convert emails to PDFs (abysmal failure), and exporting mboxes via Apple recommendations (attachments gone and half of them come out blank). Am I destined to keep 4 old laptops running just to keep these archival emails intact? TIA!
I archive email in Devonthink. I can then use DTP’s powerful search tools to find the emails relevant to whatever I’m working on, and, if necessary, add them to the DTP database that houses that particular project or subject matter.
I’m the family member tasked with administering a number of estates and trusts, and being able to put all the email back-and-forths with lawyers, accountants, courts, and family members in one place—with attachments—that I can parse as needed has been a lifesaver.
DTP saves the email messages as .eml files, which means they retain all of the original email metadata and allows them to be opened in Apple Mail should you need to do so.
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I’m all in on this too. Regular archives of my Apple Mail mailboxes and the amount of time it’s saved my bacon in DEVONthink. Fast, powerful, love it.
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You can export your email to EagleFiler and still work with your messages. It stores your email in MBOX format and functions like an offline email client.
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DEVONthink’s been my solution as well. I do one database per email archive, and if it was a Google Apps account or similar, I store the related cloud files in the same database. It’s pretty rare that I need to search across multiple email accounts/databases, but it supports that.
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Thanks everyone for the advice. What a great group of Mac Geniuses (the real ones)!
I dusted off my 2016 Devonthink 2, upgraded to 4 Pro so I can use try this solution. Fingers crossed!
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