Move/Backup mails on external HD but still searchable?

[petersilie]

Hi

I am looking for a solution to move around 20k of my 30k emails from osx mail to an external hard drive - with the possibility to still search through them.

Is there any backup software for mails with a search option without having to restore a full backup?

Thanks!

 

[monokakata]

There's a simple solution, though it may not be what you want.

The way I read your posting, you want to move certain emails and then leave them where you moved them as a kind of archive, but you need to be able to search that archive.

You could copy your email library to that external drive, using standard copy/paste rather than any kind of backup software.

The easy way would be to copy the entire library, but if you know which folders or sets of folders you want to archive, then you can copy those and no others. You'd just be doing copy/paste exactly as you would for any other folders or files.

Then use Spotlight to search there, just as you'd use it to search anywhere.

I had occasion to copy my mail library to another (internal) disk a couple of months ago, and I just tried searching it -- worked as expected. Not only did Spotlight find email messages with my search target, it also located it in attachments. There are 66k items in mine.

When you find the email you're interested in, you just double-click it and it's displayed.

 

[petersilie]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for!

One more questions: When you search those mails with Spotlight and click a result, will the email then open up in OSX mail or only in a preview like with Quickview?

 

[monokakata]

A double-click opens it up in Mac Mail and from that point on you can treat it like any other mail message -- forward, etc.