MacOS – Transfer Emails to Generic Folder

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In my Mac Mail I have all my emails saved to my Mac, as opposed to on my mail server using iMap.

All the emails are organised with a large number of folders and sub folders, again all of which are saved straight to my Mac.

I wish to save all of the individual emails in a folder on an external hard drive as I am moving to a new Mac and want to have access to these emails, but not import them to Mac Mail on my new Mac.

If you select an individual email in Mac Mail, then drag and drop it to a desktop folder, for example, it saves it as an email which you can open from the desktop folder without it having to be stored in your Mac Mail. If you select multiple emails and drag and drop, only one email is transferred.

How can I do this drag and drop method for all the folders and all emails within those folders, to save them on an external hard drive.

I don't want to export all the emails from my current Mac, then reimport them to my new Mac Mail. I want to be able to access all the emails in their structure, but through my hard drive instead of having them show in Mac Mail.

Guidance appreciated

Best Answer

To save all mails individually in the Finder, use a little trickery:

In Mail, select all messages you want and right-click + choose Forward as Attachment. This creates a new e-mail which you then send to yourself.

When the e-mail has arrived, bring it to the front and press Cmd-A to select all attachments in the e-mail. Click the Save button and choose Save All… from the drop-down menu, then select or create a folder in the file dialog.

The e-mails will be saved as individual .eml files, which you can quickview in the Finder or open in Mail or Thunderbird.

The downside is that the files are saved with the subject line as file name. So there is no date or sender to organize the files in the Finder. You'd have to pre-organize in Mail.

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