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10.5: Mail.app now exports to mbox format Apps
Not sure how much of a "hint" this is, more like hidden thing. It might just not be obvious from Apple's terminology, but the mailbox "Archive" functionality mentioned in the 300+ features...
Archive Mailbox
Create an archive of your mailbox to back up important messages or to transfer your mail to another computer.
... is in fact an export to plain-old mbox format! From Mail's own help topic on "Archiving mailboxes:"
Mail archives the mailboxes as .mbox packages. If you've already archived a mailbox, Mail does not overwrite the existing file but appends a number to the filename to create a new version of it.

If you need to restore messages, you can import an archived .mbox file as "Mail for Mac OS X."
I've "tested" it successfully, and it also works with RSS feeds with the "Archive Feed" item (in both the contextual and Mailbox menus).

[robg adds: So now there's another method of mbox export, in addition to this one.]
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10.5: Mail.app now exports to mbox format | 5 comments | Create New Account
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10.5: Mail Archive Bug in Leopard
Authored by: gregpare on Dec 03, '07 09:48:33AM

Here's a potentially fun problem with Mail.app on Leopard that everyone might want to know about...

Start archiving a bunch of mailboxes then quit out of Mail. First off, there's no obvious progress as to how much has been archived (except in the Activity window -- which apparently is NOT the same as the default Mail Activity pane), and secondly Mail just stops archiving with no error or warning. Start up Mail again and all is forgotten.

Anybody else wanna verify this?



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10.5: Mail Archive Bug in Leopard
Authored by: schmunzelmonster on Jan 31, '08 08:28:14PM

same thing. my archives seemed ok, I can import them and get the same number of mails in the imported folder as in the original folder. But when I delete the archived mail, erase deleted messages in all accounts, quit Mail.app, and reopen, the deleted messages are back where they were. interesting. powerbook G4 1.25 10.5.1



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10.5: Mail.app now exports to mbox format
Authored by: osxpounder on Dec 03, '07 02:05:04PM

very cool to know. Thank you.



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10.5: Mail.app now exports to mbox format
Authored by: schmunzelmonster on Jan 31, '08 08:06:29PM

it did take a very short time to write that archive, but it had enough MB. I reimported, and all messages were still there. Maybe a good thing to reimport and compare with the original mailbox before throwing out the latter. thanks for the note.



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10.5: Mail.app now exports to mbox format
Authored by: schmunzelmonster on Jan 31, '08 09:29:53PM

ps undeletable messages: deleting the whole folder works, messages did not reappear. An empty white folder may was sometimes left over but a second try would delete that also.



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