Can I make Mail.app read and write to a folder on a different disk?

[GandalfTheGrey]

Hi there.

I would like to find a way to get Mail to read from and save emails/attachments in a folder that is not on the startup disk.

My reason is that I have two internal disks. One is a 250GB solid state drive, where the OS is installed. I'm running out of space.

The other disk is a 2 TB normal disk, with tons of free space. My mail folder is almost 19GB big. I would like that folder to be on the larger disk, not the startup disk where the Library folder is(which contains the folder with all the mail data). Since it's just email, there's really no need for it to be reading and storing date on a SSD.

If this is not possible, does anyone know a way to only archive everything before a certain date, say, one year ago?

Thank you very much.

OS X 10.7.4
3.4 Ghz quad core
16 Gig RAM
Mail version 5.2

 

[UnSainted]

Home Directory

You can migrate your entire Home directory to the larger disk. I know there is an Apple document somewhere on this but a quick google search yielded many such sites..

http://martinbay.net/how-to-move-user-folder/

 

[GandalfTheGrey]

Thanks for the link. I didn't do that specifically, but it pointed me in the right direction.

Since I don't really want to move my entire home folder off of the SSD, since it seems like that kind of defeats the purpose of installing the OS there to begin with, I found that I can create a symbolic link and point it to my mail folder after I moved it to my larger disk, and it works famously.

The tutorial that I found most helpful for this:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1058177/symboliclinks.html

After creating the droplet as described, I moved my mail folder to the larger disk. Then I dropped it on the droplet, no pun intended, and it created a symbolic link for me in the same location. I moved that link folder to my startup disk's mail folder location, deleted the original mail folder, and left the symlink there so it'll point to the larger disk. Works great.