[DM-MUG] Fwd: Re: [MacLaw] Mail archiving and handling - more info from local mug

[Stuart Thiessen]

After your discussions, I went to look and see what is there. I  
thought it was stored in an mbox only. Mboxes have all the emails  
stored in one big file. However, in ~/Library/Mail, under each account  
(POP or IMAP) in the Messages folder, it actually stores each message  
as a separate .emlx file which is the same as the email entry stored  
in mbox for that email. It also includes the attachments encoded  
within the email. The emlx files can be opened directly with Quick  
Look. But the real test would have to be:

1) Copy the emlx file to another folder.
2) Delete the email from Mail.
3) Open the emlx file in Quick Look and access the email AND attachment?
4) If the email is visible but the attachment is not, then how to  
extract the attachment? Can Mail show me the email without importing  
it back into Mail?

If this works, then the next step is to make a script that could copy  
emails directly from ~/Library/Mail folder and create a Zip or DMG  
archive of those emails. The trick would then be how to identify  
archiving criteria and how to instruct Mail to delete those specific  
emails (Applescript?). I suppose another programming project for a  
rainy day unless someone else has done this kind of work? Another  
concern might be if there is a problem doing this from the perspective  
of "don't meddle with Mail's internal workings" (that's why you would  
need to delete the emails from within Mail manually or  
programmatically rather than removing the emlx files directly in the  
filesystem). :)

Thanks,

Stuart

On 29 Feb 2008, at 09:30 , Darcy Baston wrote:

> You can achieve it though. You just have to not use Mail's archive  
> feature, and instead browse with the Finder to where the individual  
> messages are stored, copy them somewhere else, and then delete the  
> originals from Mail.
>
> On Friday, February 29, 2008, at 08:07AM, "Victoria L. Herring" <vlh at herringlaw.com 
> > wrote:
>
>> good point.  There is thus a problem with trying to export/save
>> emails from programs to easily searchable and returnable items.  For
>> instance, I have old emails ref. a case from 2002 and need to find
>> one particular one.  That's the issue, to be able to 'offload' or
>> save the old emails outside the program [so it doesn't bulk up] but
>> still be able to access the info.
>>
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