I manage my iCloud email via Apple Mail (Mail.app). I have limited knowledge of the workings of email and servers, but my understanding is that this is an IMAP account and hence all the mail (Inbox, Archive, Sent Items) is stored on Apples servers. I have a couple of questions…
Is there a copy of this email stored locally on the Mac as well? I have done a search for files of type .mbox but nothing is found?
Can I use ‘On My Mac’ as a ‘backup’ by copying the mailboxes across? Is this what creates the mbox files? (I have other system wide backups, Backblaze/Time Machine but I would prefer a separate backup of the mailboxes that I could turn to if ever need be).
You can find the mail files in ~/Library/Mail/V8. There are a number of obscurely-named folders in that folder (one for each mail account that you’ve configued). These folders contain the .mbox folders. There are usually multiple .mbox folders. For example INBOX.mbox, Sent Items.mbox, and so on.
In Mail > Preferences > Accounts you can decide whether you want attachments stored locally for each IMAP account, including iCloud. Otherwise, the messages are stored locally as well as online – this is normal for IMAP configurations.
It’s best to let your mail client manage your mailboxes, and synchronize them for you. It’s also best not to muck around inside of mail folders.
I don’t know the answer to that question. For one, it may depend on the email system that you use. For example, if your email is on an IMAP server, you can just re-download them from the server on a new device.
It also depends on which app that you use:
I don’t know if Mail.app stores its messages is a way which can be moved to another Mac.
I believe Mail.app stores files in an MBOX format, which is pretty common.
Therefore, backing up with Time Machine would backup these files as well. I do similar - I have Postbox download copies of all my email to my local machine, and then Arq backs up these files (MBOX files), so I could import these in to another mail program that supports MBOX’s at a later date. This way I get versioned copies of it as well, so I can roll back in time.
Do you use postbox only for backup purposes? I realized that I bought a lifetime license many years ago but never really used it. I’ve decided to start archiving/backing up my email.
No, it’s my standard email client for personal emails (I use Outlook for work emails, because, well, it works and it’s what the University officially supports).
Postbox is built on Thunderbird, which I like, but has a better theme, layout and tweaks than Thunderbird. It also integrates better with the Mac, and is able to use Contacts, rather than rely on it’s own internal address book (but does support that as well).
Both Horcrux and Mail Archiver X look interesting.
I had another idea. My Synology can function as an IMAP server, so I installed that package. In my mailbox I created sub folders for each of my email accounts that I use in Mail.app, and wrote an AppleScript triggered from Keyboard Maestro that takes the selected email messages and move them to the Synology into the proper folder based on the email account they were in.
All emails can be searched and browsed in Mail.app, but these archives no longer clutter my “outside” IMAP providers and mailboxes. On the Synology they are stored in a text file format, similar to but not identical to MBOX format so they can be easily backed up via HyperBackup to the cloud.
I will see how this works out over the next few weeks.
Been trying both Mail Archiver X and Horcrux. I landed on the latter, as Mail Archiver X seemed to be quite a resource hog and – critical for me at the time – would not be very considerate of the main drive space, which is a huge issue with a small SSD.
Horcrux is leaner (even if it could be even leaner to my taste…) and does its job well and silently. I’m happy with it, thanks for the recommendation.
I guess it depends how often and when you run it.
Mine has a schedule at 4am to archive emails within the past 2 weeks, it takes about 20 minutes maybe.
I found MailSteward the clear winner for my strategy. EagleFiler did more than I was asking. It too didn’t export mbox files properly, it created a folder “mbox.mbox” which couldn’t be opened. Horcrux was an automatically functioning app, which requires email credentials (I want to manually deal with mbox files). Mail Archiver X unfortunately didn’t combine mbox files into 1 when exporting, instead exported mboxs individually imported earlier. I did this research over a span of 2 hours, so take it with a grain of salt. Hope it helps!
I used MailSteward at work several years ago and considered it a good product.
FWIW, the file EagleFIler creates when importing email messages is an MBOX file (named “Archive” in the following image of my eflibrary). I’ve never needed to export it since Apple Mail will import it directly from the EF Files folder.
After two years of using Horcrux, I had to look for something else.
Horcrux did what it needed to do as long as it worked. I like the user interface and I like how Horcrux is storing the emails as individual files. I had to deal with crashes. Sometimes Horcrux would archive an email that apparently was causing Horcrux to crash. It has happened three times to me. The only solution I found was to delete the mails that caused the crash from my IMAP account. I was able to find those mails in question when it did happen twice last year. I failed to find the mail in question this year.
The bad thing this year was that Horcrux apparently was trying to do its backup thing daily - and crashing without error window or any other notice. For two months. Which means: no backups for 2 months. Fortunately, I did discover that without having the need to restore stuff. It is to some degree baffling that Horcrux does not notify the user about failed backups. I am aware that an app has no chance to do anything when it crashes, but why is there no check when the app is launched: there are daily backups and Horcrux was only able to to the last one two months ago. It would have been nice to be made aware of this issue. I contacted the developer with a crash log. I did not receive an answer.
I had been using MailSteward before. What I do not like about MailSteward is the user interface and how the app does present mails: embedded images are not shown as embedded but as attachments. These days, many emails are HTML and they include images. And I want to see them. I may have been doing something wrong. I do not know. Then again, it worked like a charm and is reliable.
I remembered this thread though and started looking at other options. So, I today had a look at Mail Archiver X. I am very pleased so far (I bought it). While it has a unique UI and a different look, it does everything I want. It does a fantastic job presenting me the emails (they look beautiful) while maintaining my IMAP folder structure, there are schedules and you can choose to be notified after a backup which I am considering given my recent experiences - Features of Mail Archiver X.
