[X4U] Archiving Mail

[Scott]

On Aug 6, 2005, at 8:51 PM, Rad Craig wrote:

> I use the Mail.app included in X.  I use it for an IMAP account for  
> my business.  I have 2-300 individual folders, very organized, for  
> vendor and customer relations as well as product development/ 
> research.  As you can imagine, this is a HUGE mail file, well over  
> 1GB.  I don't delete anything.  I keep everything sent or received.
>
> I do this so that I can go back to reference old emails from  
> customers or vendors if needed.
>
> Is there a way to archive some of these emails, say everything  
> older than 6 months?  The only requirement is that I want to be  
> able to search this archive if needed.  All of my IMAP mail is  
> stored on the server, but I'd like to keep the archive on my local  
> machine that the mail client runs on to conserve space on my web  
> server.
>
> Is there any way to do this?  If would be nice to save space and  
> improve performance, only accessing the old stuff when needed.  I  
> know I could do this with Outlook, but that was with a POP account,  
> I just saved the old archives
>

You could create  a local folder hierarchy in Mail. Just create the  
new folders "On My Mac" instead of in your imac account. Then move  
mail you wish to archive to the local folders. They'll be off the  
server, saving space, and you'll only access them if you open the  
local folder. You'll need to back up your local Mailboxes folder, but  
if you're already backing up your home folder, that does the trick.

-- 
Scott