MobileMe, Mail: Copying MobileMe or IMAP email messages to your hard disk

  • Last Modified: February 17, 2009
  • Article: HT1063
  • Old Article: 306054

Summary

In Mail in Mac OS X, you can save copies of MobileMe mail messages to a local disk, for example if you want to create "backups" of MobileMe messages you have received. (This article also applies to any IMAP email account in which message caching is turned off.)

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard note: You can archive your IMAP mailboxes in Mail if you want to save a local backup of them.

Products Affected

Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.5, MobileMe Mail, MobileMe

Creating backups of MobileMe mail messages (or any IMAP messages when caching is turned off)

You can either manually drag messages from Mail's message list to your computer (to your desktop, for example) to create copies, or follow these steps:

Create an offline mailbox on your Mac

If you have not yet created a local "On My Mac" mailbox to save MobileMe messages to, follow these steps. If you already have done this, skip to the next section.

  1. Open Mail.
  2. From the Mailbox menu, choose New Mailbox....
  3. In the New Mailbox sheet, choose "On My Mac" from the Location pop-up menu.
  4. Enter a name in the Name field such as "Copies of MobileMe emails." or "Local backup".
  5. Click OK.

You'll notice that the new mailbox appears in the list of Mail mailboxes with a large or small folder icon.

Copy/back up messages to your offline mailbox

  1. Open Mail.
  2. Select the message(s) in your MobileMe mailbox that you want to copy/back up.
  3. From the Message menu, choose Copy To > (Name of your offline mailbox). Alternatively you can Control-click or right-click the message(s) and choose Copy To > (Name) from the contextual menu; or you can could hold Option while dragging the message (without opening it) to the mailbox' folder icon in Mail.

Note: Use Copy To, not Move To when creating a copy. The Move To menu choice copies messages but also removes them from their original location.

Your copied mail will now be available on your Mac even if you are offline. To access copied messages, click the offline mailbox' folder icon.

Additional Information

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