Help with mail options needed

[indychris]

Good morning, everyone!

This has been an ongoing problem for me for years and I simply can't come up with a good solution. I work with several different organizations, and manage a 501-c-3 myself as well as working for a business where email ie essential. I have well over a dozen email addresses that I juggle and have thousands of emails archived. I can't seem to find a mail app that can handle my email load. I don't know what it is that I'm doing that is so problematic, but Apple Mail started having issues for me several years ago and has never worked well since. I've tried others over the years, including Spark most recently. I love spark's interface and it worked fine at first, now it just stops responding when I launch it and I have to perform a force quit.

Is there any good email solution that is designed to handle a heavy business load? I rarely--if ever--send out mass emails, so it is solely a matter of receiving and organizing emails from up to 20 addresses which I just can't seem to pull off effectively. due to legal and other issues, I need to keep emails accessible/searchable for at least the past 5-7 years.

Any thoughts?

Many, MANY thanks!

 

[Stephen.R]

Well I guess the first question is, what are you doing with the emails you need to keep but are done "dealing with" (i.e. the equivalent of physical mail you'd store into a filing cabinet or storage box)?

 

[NoBoMac]

Not an ideal solution, and requires some effort to organize, but, can use Mail's "Export Mailbox" option to save the emails in a specific mailbox/folder to disk. Delete those emails out of Mail. You now have an archive that you can re-import into Mail should the need arise.

With this method, you can also use Spotlight search to locate specific text in the saved mailbox. Or use shell commands (aka grep) to search on these archives (the emails will be saved to a text file named similar to WhereYouSaved/AccountName/NameOfMailbox.mbox/mbox)

Unfortunately, seems like export does not work with Smart Mailboxes.

Alternatively, you might look into what your mail service provider has for options. For example, Gmail in their settings screen, there are options for show/hide mailboxes/labels: stuff you want to remain "archived" on Google servers and not see in Mail, turn off those folders from showing in IMAP clients.

 

[indychris]

Well I guess the first question is, what are you doing with the emails you need to keep but are done "dealing with" (i.e. the equivalent of physical mail you'd store into a filing cabinet or storage box)?

Hey, Stephen- thanks for the reply. I have a number of email that have conversations that can easily extend more than a year, and it's not uncommon to be up to three. I can typically archive anything that is 4 years or older, but I need to be able to search and pull up information without too much difficulty.
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Not an ideal solution, and requires some effort to organize, but, can use Mail's "Export Mailbox" option to save the emails in a specific mailbox/folder to disk. Delete those emails out of Mail. You now have an archive that you can re-import into Mail should the need arise.

With this method, you can also use Spotlight search to locate specific text in the saved mailbox. Or use shell commands (aka grep) to search on these archives (the emails will be saved to a text file named similar to WhereYouSaved/AccountName/NameOfMailbox.mbox/mbox)

Unfortunately, seems like export does not work with Smart Mailboxes.

Alternatively, you might look into what your mail service provider has for options. For example, Gmail in their settings screen, there are options for show/hide mailboxes/labels: stuff you want to remain "archived" on Google servers and not see in Mail, turn off those folders from showing in IMAP clients.

Thanks, NoBo! I have mail accounts from several different providers including gmail, apple, hotmail, hover, etc. It's probably going to be awfully convoluted to have to take different approaches for different accounts. I was hoping that maybe there is a true business class solution that would handle large volumes, but maybe not. I recognize that I am very atypical in what I do with my email.

 

[mahoneym]

MailMate - Lots of great how to videos on YouTube.