We have wonderful software for backing up our disks, but I don’t know of any for backing up mail.
If you lose or need to recreate your inbox or one of your mailboxes it is incredibly dificultades and you need to dive into the mail folder of your library.
Is there software that you set up and will back your email up silently and efficiently should something go wrong?
Tommy
Time Machine. But you may argue that to restore from it requires diving into the backed up mail folder.
You know, when Time Machine was first introduced, you could use it to Go Back in Time in Mail. That was cool-ish.
You can export a mailbox to Unix “mbox” format for backup proposes.
check out Email Archiver X for automated backups
check out EagleFiler for manual backups
If you’re a DevonTHINK Pro user you can use that too.
Not a solution for restoring email data but I use Mail Steward for long term backup of email:
It creates/adds-to a mySQL database of emails and so is independent of the mail formats and mailbox location and it has good search facilities.
Every year I move my online emails to local (on-my-Mac) mailboxes to limit the size of the online mailboxes. Mail Steward is configured to include these mailboxes during backups. It is also quite space efficient so I am able to back up 20 years of emails on Bluray disk (~30Gb).
I still depend on Time Machine for restoring lost/corrupt email data in Apple Mail but have never had to use it for this purpose.
Update: It looks like the latest Mail Steward can restore individual emails to the Apple Mail system, as well as other features such as replying to an email.
I wonder if Take Charge of macOS Mail has a chapter on importing mail from the .mbox files in the Library folder.
I have tried MailSteward, Mail Archiver X, and DEVONthink and settled on Mail Archiver X. It does nightly back up and has a browsable searchable database organised by Mailbox. The developer is very responsive and helpful.
I have never done it, but I believe that all three of these it would be possible to restore your email in bulk to Apple Mail. I have used Mail Archiver X to restore individual emails to Apple Mail.
I also export archives of each mailbox every few months as a long stop. I have successfully restored these to Apple Mail in the past. This does not involve any third party software but of course is not browsable or searchable for individual emails.
I was going to ask about backing up email, too. I have a Comcast App and read my email in this App. I have lots of folders and important stuff in them. How would I back up the App and all the folders?
For my own domain, I have a weekly cron job running on the host server that tars and zips my entire ~/mail directory. And I have a corresponding weekly launchd job on my Mac that copies the file locally, where it gets backed up along with the rest of my stuff.
Can I do that in one step for all mailboxes in an iCloud, Google, or other account (that appears in Apple Mail)? Or do I need to export each mailbox individually? Or do I need to export each top-level mailbox individually, but the export captures all nested mailboxes? Thanks.
I export each mailbox separately, at the start of a new year. (See link below.) So, sorry, I can’t provide any insight about your questions. The text inside the export is readable tho, so you could dig and see what you get
Let me ask a related question. Suppose you want to make a paper backup. of an Apple Mail thread including all attachments. I have spent some quality time with Claude, etc, but can not yet come uup with a way to consistantly print messages with any attachments printed in-line with the message.
Has anyone solved this thorny problem?
“Back Up and Restore Your Email” is an entry in Take Control of Apple Mail’s table of contents.
Perhaps @jk1 will chime in and answer your question.
Yes, I do have a fair bit of material on backing up and restoring email in Take Control of Apple Mail. The very short version is, if you back up everything in your home folder, then all the mailboxes and messages in ~/Library/Mail are part of that, and you can absolutely import any or all of those messages directly into Mail, right from your backup. It’s messy, though, because those go into local mailboxes, not into the original IMAP/iCloud/Exchange/whatever accounts they came from, so there may be a lot of manual moving later on. (You wouldn’t want to put the files back in their original locations without importing them, because that would screw up online message syncing.)
I wanted to do this in a pretty big way 3-4 years ago. I had several thousand emails with attachments, mostly PDFs, that I needed to render in order with the attachments inline or immediately following the mail. I spent quite a bit of time on it and am sad to report that I never found a satisfactory solution. I was a bit surprised as it seemed as though it was something that a lot of people would want. I do vaguely recall that there was one piece of Windows-only software that purported to do the job, but it was very expensive (sold as part of a large enterprise-focused package) and was quite poorly reviewed. I think there were also some online services that seemed as though they might work, but my files were too sensitive to trust to third-parties. Please report back, or message me directly, if you discover something I missed.
To my astonishment, because like you I see lots of need for this, I still can’t find anything. And my attempts at vibe coding to a solution were – insufficient. Seems like an Opportunity…
I just looked at my Mail Steward database. It allows me to search for archived emails with attachments. It can then print all the emails in the resulting list. However, as with other apps, it does not print the attachment contents.
You could make a feature request to the developer (link above).
I think the reason for that is because this is actually a really difficult problem.
You can easily enough use Applescript to iterate through the emails printing each one out but unless the attachment is something like a JPEG or a single page PDF which mail will display in-line for each email you would have to open the attachment using whatever parent app is needed and print from there. If you have a whole bunch of one- or two-line emails with attachments there is no way to snug the attachment up under the two-line email—the attachment is going to have to be on a separate page or pages if it’s a big Excel spreadsheet.
Could be done but the sales would probably never pay for the development costs.
Dave
now if only we could get an AI interested…