Mail: How to organize your email

By organize do you mean to back up your email locally on your hard drive or to be able to retrieve email easily?

For easy retrieval, I have just search in Mail which I find faster than searching in Outlook.

For backup, try these links:

Copy IMAP email to Hard Drive

Back up email from Hard Drive

 

I personally create folders in mail, not smart folders. Smart folders wouldn't move them, only show them there if they meet criteria. Click the + icon in the bottom left and choose to create a new folder on the mac, then drag emails there as needed. Make as many as you like with subfolders if you want even. I have autorules set up just like in Outlook, so everything is dandy.

 

PST files are (as I'm sure you know) just Data files that you 'import' into outlook.

From your other posts sounds like you can do the same thing I do where as (as others have put it) create folders and setup auto rules just like in outlook.

The file structure for Mail is a bit different so just having multiple pst files isn't going to work that great.

Smart folders don't move, they are similar to the search folders/filters in outlook.

What I do is have a set of folders with rules assigned inside a top level folder. Then smart folders to sort out the really important emails I need to pay attention to.

 

same question

Hi!

I have the same exact question as the original poster. At least, I hope that we're on the same track.

Yes, you can create additional folders to store/move/organize your mail. But what I was thinking was actually moving your mail from the mail server to your local machine.

An example would be if I had a mailbox maximum size of 10 megs on the mail server. I'm at 9.5 megs today, and in order to continue to receive mail, I have to delete some messages off the server. I don't want to loose them, I just want to "move" them to a file on the local machine and still be able to open the mailbox in mail.app instead of storing them on the server.

I know Thunderbird can do this, but I don't see anywhere in mail.app.

EDIT: Actually, I just checked. In Thunderbird, it's called "Local Folders". I played around with Mail.app and you can right click on a folder and choose "Archive". Then, "Import" the archived mbox file into Mail.app. But for some reason, I feel like this isn't what I'm looking for because it's not very clean.


Thanks!