mac mail

hello, is there any way of archiving mail on an external drive ? i want to move all my mail off my laptop, but still be able to view it somewhere else ? if not, why not ?

Try Save As under file then select your drive I would create a folder for it though.

Note: Moved to more appropriate forum. This was posted in our "off topic" forum and it's clearly an application question.

thanks for the advice, but i need a little more than that. i am trying to save 1000s of mails in 50 folders and sub folders so that i can empty mac mail and start afresh. so what do i "save as" and how is my external drive going to "read" the mails ??

Select the Mailbox in the left pane of Mail (this would be the parent of the subfolders you want to archive). Click the Mailbox menu and then click "Archive Mailbox". It will prompt you for a destination for your archive - select your external drive.

If you want to bring your archive back, you can do so through the File menu and choose "Import Mailbox". When prompted, browse to your external and select the mailbox files that were produced by the Archive operation.

hi there, great, thanks for this. is there any way of being able to view the mails in my external drive - ie without re-importing the entire mailbox back into mail on my laptop ?

fast_eddie said:

hi there, great, thanks for this. is there any way of being able to view the mails in my external drive - ie without re-importing the entire mailbox back into mail on my laptop ?

Click to expand...

Not that I'm aware of, but if I remember correctly, the .mbox files that Mail outputs are fairly standard. So, I'm sure there's a program out there that can casually browse the files and allow you to see what's in them.

mac mail on external drive

wow ! you mean browse each individual mail in my external drive ? if you can point me in the right direction for such a programme i will be a very happy boy