[MlMt] mail archiving

[John Doherty]

This is an interesting question. FWIW, I would avoid mbox format, too 
likely to end up with huge unwieldy files although I guess that depends 
on how you have your mail segregated and organized.

I have never looked into MailMate's export or import features before. 
I'm using an older version of MailMate, 1.13.2 (5673).

When I select some messages and do Command->Export->Copy to Folder, I 
end up with a bunch of .eml files.

Do you have, or can you get, an email account other than the one 
provided by your institution? Are you willing to pay anything for one? 
It sounds like you need to export about 18 GB of mail and I don't think 
anyone will offer you that much storage for free.

Wait, it seems from this:

<https://www.techradar.com/best/best-free-email-services-for-year>

That Yahoo will give you 1 TB for free. That surprises me but could be 
true.

I think gmail gives you 15 GB free, which sounds like it's not quite 
enough for your purpose here but nothing stops you from having multiple 
gmail accounts, so you could create two.

Fastmail will give you 30 GB for a little under $50 per year.

When you import a bunch of .eml files into MailMate, you get to choose 
what account to import them in to, assuming you have more than one 
configured. You may have to click the Options button in the lower left 
of the Import dialog box.

So if you had a second email account that can store 18 GB of mail, you 
could export from your institution account and them import into the 
other account. That way, all your mail would still be in MailMate, just 
not all in the same account. It would all be searchable in the same way, 
though.

I also just tried importing the same .eml files into Apple Mail (which 
does not have any accounts configured) and it worked, but sort of oddly. 
Each message appears as a folder containing one message. Maybe mbox 
really would have been better, not sure.

The imported messages appear under "On My Mac->Import" in Mail. They are 
all in ~/Library/Mail. Note that I do not have iCloud configured to 
include Mail. Not sure where the imported messages would have ended up 
if I did.

I don't have Thunderbird installed anymore but have helped other people 
in the past use its local storage feature to archive mail. They were 
mostly Thunderbird users anyway, so they still had all their mail in one 
place.

In any case, I would do some experimentation will small numbers of 
messages before deciding what to do for the whole thing.

Anyway, there's some ideas you could consider. I think the best place to 
store email messages is in an email program, so in your place, I would 
try to get all this old mail into another account, or two if necessary.

On Mon 2023-03-20 05:47 AM MDT -0600, <alain.israel at pasteur.fr> wrote:

> My institution politely asked me to reduce by half the amount of space 
> my emails occupy on their server (currently 36 Go : given my position 
> in this institution, I had to keep ~20 years of emails; I am now 
> semi-retired and should be able to “delete” some of them). 
> Therefore I decided to archive old emails. I found a lot of relevant 
> suggestions in this forum, and decided to test Eaglefiler, Horcrux and 
> Mailsteward, but I was not thrilled by any of them, for different 
> reasons. Then I thought the simplest solution was to export individual 
> mailboxes under the mbox format. This works well (I am using Mailmate 
> 5937). Then I am left with : how to easily read, search, …. these 
> mbox files? Eaglefiler does it (Horcrux and Mailsteward don’t, they 
> work by directly accessing the IMAP server), but is apparently unable 
> to perform incremential backups.
>
> Is there a simple way to do that?
>
> I had a final question regarding the Archive mailbox in Mailmate : how 
> does it work (I could not find the info in the Mailmate manual, which 
> is unfortunately not searchable; nor did I understand how this mailbox 
> became populated by a seemingly random set of emails), is it a local 
> storage, …? Can the exported mbox files, once deleted on the server, 
> be re-imported in Mailmate and stored locally (while still 
> searchable)?
>
> I realize some of these questions only demonstrate my poor knowledge 
> of how email clients actually work, therefore I would appreciate any 
> help.
>
> Alain