Drag and drop Mail folders to create quick backups

Feb 24, '04 09:05:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I found that you can back up old email messages by creating a new "local" mailbox in Mail.app (Mailbox menu —> New...), and then dragging messages you wish to back up into that mailbox in the drawer. This is obvious to most people, but what may not be obvious is that you can then back up that mailbox (it would be currently located in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/boxname.mbox) to any location you choose, and you can access the messages in that folder any time by double-clicking on the mailboxname.mbox file in Finder.

The mailbox opens up in its own window in Mail. I keep archives of old messages in mbox files on my firewire drive. This is really convenient for email pack-rats like me who really don't like the clutter of thousands of email messages in the mail drawer, but can't bear to throw them out. This is also a quick way to access locally-stored messages from a remote mac.

[robg adds: You can also simply drag the folder out of Mail into the Finder, and Mail will create the .mbox file wherever you drop the folder. If you immediately try to open the backup folder, you'll get a warning about the mailbox being in use; quit and restart mail, though, and it should open just fine. I've been using this method to back up critical Mail folders for a while now; I thought we'd covered it before, but I couldn't find it in the archives...]

Comments (2)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004021615525713