If you have 1000s of emails to copy, I hope you have plenty of spare time on your hands. Click on an individual email message as a test. Now click on "save as". Select the drop down arrow and you'll see you have three choices: Raw message, Rich Text Format, and Plain text. After selecting any one of the three choices you can then drag and drop the message to a DVD to burn. Keep in mind that a single layer DVD will hold around 4.6 GB.
Lots of work though. There may be a way to archive the entire Mail folder or folders which would certainly be easier than the above. Perhaps someone else has a better suggestion.
I can't see how much it costs now because I already own it, but it must have been cheap.
It creates folders of PDF versions of the emails, with attachments preserved in matching files. I presume you already know how to burn folders to a data DVD, so that should do the trick for you.
Yes -- for a little while. How long depends on how far back your Time Machine can store things, which is dependent on how much larger your TM drive is compared to your boot drive its archiving to. In short, I would recommend TM highly for retrieving an email from a month or three ago that you need to get back to, but it is not for long-term storage of anything.
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