Mini-Tutorial: Backing up Mail.app mail

Old e-mail messages are usually among the neglected components of a healthy backup routine. Despite their general tendency to contain sensitive, important information, and the utility they can serve when searching for old contacts or other data, many users fail to properly preserve previously viewed or sent messages.

In addition, having too many messages in your Mail.app database can cause significant performance issues, both when refreshing the entire list of messages, as well as when performing routine searches of recent items, or even launching and operating within Mail.app.

Here are a few simple solutions for quickly backing up your Mail.app messages.

Copy the ~/Library/Mail folder If you are using a POP account, the simplest method of backing up your Mail.app data is to simply copy the ~/Library/Mail folder (the tilde [~] represents your home user directory) to a separate backup location -- your .Mac iDisk, a CD-R(W), DVD-R(W), an external hard drive, etc.

Your best bet is to perform this process manually by dragging the folder to its new location, as many back tools have been shown to improperly copy Mail.app's data files and folder structure.

If you ever want to restore mail backed up via this method, simply replace the ~/Library/Mail folder on your new Mac OS X installation with the "Mail" folder you've backed up to a separate volume.

If you are using an IMAP account, you can use this method as well, though not all mail will be preserved since items are only cached, not fully stored locally.

One huge advantage of this straightforward method is that all proper tags (date, sender, subject, etc.) will be preserved, and messages will be stored in the standard .mbox format, which is readable by a number of other e-mail clients if you choose to switch away from Mail.app in the future.

Forward messages to a Webmail account If you use a Webmail service with lots of extra capacity (Google's Gmail currently offers 2 GB), you may want to consider forwarding your old messages to this account, and setting up a rule in Mail.app to forward all new messages as they are received.

To set up a new rule, open Mail.apps preferences, and click the "Rules" button. Select "Add Rules." Select "Every Message" from the "If [...] of the following conditions are met:" field, and "Forward Message" from the "Perform the following actions" field.

Once this rule is created, you can either select all the old messages in your Account Inbox and select "Apply Rules" from the "Messages" menu item. Alternatively, you can simply use the "Forward" option.

There are some significant drawbacks to this method, however.

First, the appropriate tags will be lost. All old mail you forward to the Webmail account will have a time stamp of the day it was forwarded, not the accurate time of reception or sending. In addition, all messages will be "from" your own personal e-mail address, so it will be impossible to accurately organize according to sender.

Second, there are some privacy and security issues to consider. Google uses technology that targets ads to users based on the content of e-mail messages. Google does not provide any guarantee for long term existence of Gmail accounts, and in fact discourages automatic forwarding of e-mail.

Still, Google's comprehensive, and fast built-in search functionality pacifies the above complaints to some extent.

Saving/stripping attachments There is an easy method for stripping your inbox of all attachment files, saving them in a separate location rather than allowing them to eat large amounts of disk space on your startup volume.

Simply select all the messages in your inbox and use the "Save Attachments" option in Mail.app's "File Menu." Once you've saved pertinent attachments to an appropriate location, you can again select all messages and select "Remove Attachments," emptying your Trash once the process is completed.

Use a third party utility The application ZOE is an elegant solution for locally backing up messages directly from your server (IMAP included). It has an excellent search function, and its freeware to boot.

ZOE runs as a Java applet in the background, and can be accessed through a browser interface.

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