by Reader Cathron Brewton, like many of us, would like to organize her old email in an efficient way. She writes:
I have many folders in Mail that I would like to move out of that application but keep for future reference. I’d like to keep them similarly organized to the way they currently are within Mail. Could you describe an efficient process for moving a hierarchy of folders (e.g. from a recently completed project) to Documents or Dropbox or Evernote or some other repository? Examples would be a home remodeling job involving multiple contractors and suppliers or a wedding with multiple vendors.
This can be done quite easily. Create a mailbox (choosing to save it to your Mac rather than iCloud) for each project and drag the appropriate messages to each one—so, your remodeling messages to a New Kitchen folder and wedding-related missives to the Here’s Your Dowry folder. Create a master folder for these folders, call it something like Archived Export, and place the project folders into it.
Select the master folder and choose Mailbox > Export Mailbox. In the sheet that appears choose a destination for the archive that will be created and be sure to enable the Export All Subdirectories option. Click Choose to export your folders. Because you chose to export all subfolders, two items will be saved—one bearing the name of the original folder followed by .mbox (so, in our example, Archived Export.mbox) and a folder, that’s also named after the master folder (Archived Export). Inside this folder you’ll find mbox files for each folder that’s within the master folder—New Kitchen and Here’s Your Dowry, in our case. You can then save that master folder wherever you like.
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