How to preserve iOS email messages

Mail Steward has the option for storing attachments but I don’t think embedded images are stored.
If images are important then you could save the important emails as PDFs (nothing to do with Mail Steward) but that introduces its own logistic problems.

There is a trial version of Mail Steward here:
https://mailsteward.com/

Those pesky embedded email images.
Looks like nothing mass captures them! (without saving to another format, one at a time.)

So, again, all of these posts about which app helps your archive your Mac Mail are interesting but aren’t all that relevant to the topic “How to preserve iOS email messages” for a user switching from one POP3 mail provider to another.

So - I don’t use POP3 anymore - in fact, I find it very difficult to set up an account that can even do POP3 on iOS mail anymore. It seems to ask only for your ail server details and login details and try to figure out the protocols itself - there doesn’t seem to be a manual mode to select POP3 vs. IMAP, and if the mail server can do IMAP as well as POP3, it just selects IMAP by default. Because all of my mail accounts can do IMAP, I cant’ even add a POP3 account anymore.

But I would think that mail messages would remain in the account and, as long as you set the fetch interval to “manual” on the old server, it wouldn’t throw up an error message for the old server when mail fetching happens unless you did a pull to refresh on the “All Inboxes” view. (I’m assuming that @byrds71 is closing that old account.) But - I can’t test myself with my own domain, because it supports IMAP, and I can’t even seem to set it up as POP3.

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Acknowledged but given the limitations of iOS I guess the first step is to set up the same email accounts on a Mac (same as the iOS device) and use an archiving system with the Mac.
Again, with Mail Steward you can select which accounts (or folders) you wish to archive. For example the old email account could be archived and the resulting database could then be stored (eg bluray) and a new Mail Steward archive set up for current accounts.

The secret (to bypassing the annoying server setting autodetection) is to enter completely bogus data, until you are finally prompted to enter server details. So start by entering an email like invalid@invalid.invalid (which simply will not resolve to anything).

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Yes, that has worked for me!
Use a bogus password, it fails, and then it offers you the settings options, including POP.

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With my ISP’s mail account, entering a bogus password leads to about a 10 minute wait for the password to fail. It’s not fun.

That said - it’s dopey that you can’t just enter the details yourself, as you can on MacOS Mail. Especially on iPadOS.

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Just an update on Mail Steward (https://mailsteward.com)…
Version 16 is now released, a paid upgrade. This is needed for running the app under Ventura. During installation I needed to go to Settings and grant full disk access.
It was irritating to find it had lost my previous settings for selecting mail boxes to archive (I have dozens going back nearly 20 years!). It seems to be working fine now and I should still be able to copy the archive file to a Bluray disk.

I use Mail on a Mac, and much less often on my iPhone. I have three accounts, one on my own server, a gmail and an iCloud account. Mails I don’t want to keep I delete, but those I do I file in archive folders on iCloud, one ‘sent’ and one ‘received’ for each year going back to 1998. To permit this I pay for extra space on iCloud, 100GB costing me around $5CDN a month. The archive folders are visible in the sidebar of Mac Mail, or in the Mailboxes page of iOS Mail. To keep things neat, the current year Received and Sent folders are not placed in the Archives folder, so they are easily accessed without expanding Archives and making the sidebar six feet long! Like this:

So I can archive mails from any account simply by dragging them to one of those two folders, or using the “Move To…” item in a message menubar, or the folder icon in iOS Mail. The “eCommerce” folder is just somewhere to store messages about Amazon, Discogs or other orders until they arrive. The beauty of this is that all the folders and the ability to use them is duplicated on all Apple devices, and, using Thunderbird, on my Linux machines.

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