Export Mailboxes for Backup

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can export your mailboxes out of the Mail app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s open up my Mail app. Now, when you’re looking at your mail, your mail is organized into different mailboxes. As an example, I have here my Inbox, this is a separate mailbox, my Drafts, another separate mailbox. I also have Sent and junk. When I go down to the bottom here, I also have these mailboxes that I created. Feedback, Personal Receipts, and Later. All of these are individual mailboxes. If I go up to all my inboxes, my iCloud Inbox here is a mailbox.

What we can do is export all of the mail within these individual mailboxes. So if I wanted to export all of my mail out of my Inbox, what I would do as I would select my iCloud Inbox, and then I just go up under Mailbox in the menu bar, and you’re going to see Export Mailbox.

So let’s go ahead and select us. We have a new window that opens up. And from here, I set where I want to export it to. So I’m going to go to my Desktop. I click on the Desktop here, and let’s create a new folder. I go down to New Folder and I create that new folder. So let’s just call this Mailbox Exports. And now when I click on choose, it’s going to export that mailbox, that single mailbox that I have selected. In this case, my iCloud Inbox. So let’s go ahead and export this out. I click on Choose and it is exporting that out.

Now it does take a while for it to export, but you’re not going to see your mail app do anything. If you want to see the activity, which is what I would recommend, particularly if you have a lot of mail. What you may want to do is go up under Window in the menu bar and then Show Your Activity. When I click on this, we have a new window that opens up and I can see the activity. Now this is blank, which means that it exported all of my mail. Again, if you have a lot of mail, it may take while, so this is where you can see what your mail app is doing. You don’t want to quit out of the mail up until it’s exported, everything is exported.

So I have everything exported. If we go over to my Mailbox Export folder, which I created, you’re going to see I have my Inbox there. So here’s all of my mail in that inbox. Now we can’t open this up and see all the messages just by double clicking on it. What we have to do is import this back into the mail app. I’ll show you how you do that in another lesson. So I’m going to close this. We’re going to close this window.

Let’s say I wanted to export multiple mailboxes. Well, then all you need to do is select the mailboxes you want to export. So let’s just go with my Inbox here and I’m going to go with everything here. So now it’s going to export all of that mail here. So now what I do is I go up under Mailbox again, and then we’re going to go to Export Mailbox. I’m going to select my Mailbox Export folder, which is on my Desktop. Here, I click on Choose. Let’s show our activity again. I closed it earlier. So I go up under Window and we go to our activity. And now, we’re going to be able to see that it is exporting it out. Again, I do not have a lot of mail here, so it doesn’t take a long time, but it’s a good habit to show the activity to make sure that all of your mail is exported before you close it.

So now I’m going to close this and when we go over to my Mailbox Export. What do you think we’re going to see? All of my different mailboxes. So now what I’m able to do is import these into another mail client. Mbox is just a standard, so we can easily import this into other mail clients if you need to. Or you could just use it as a backup. And then if you do need to find a mail message, you could import that back into Mail. I’ll talk about that in another lesson.

So that’s how we can export our mail, or I should say our mailboxes in Mail on the Mac. All we really have to do is just select the mailboxes we want to export. We can export just a single mailbox or multiple mailboxes. Once we have them selected, we go up under Mailboxes in the menu bar, and then you go to Export. From there, you choose which folder you want to export your mailboxes into. And then I would recommend opening up the Activity window from Window in the menu bar, so you can monitor the activity. If you have a lot of mail could take while to export everything.

So that’s how you can export your mail from the Mail app on the Mac.