Create Sub Folders in Mail & Archiving – Mac – Apple

Can you create sub-folders in Apple Mail and store them on a drive the way you can do is Microsoft Outlook? In MS Outlook, you could create a .pst folder and create as many sub-folders.

Can you do the same thing in Apple Mail?

Mail uses some lightly different terminology, in Mail “folders” are called “mailboxes” and they correspond to real folders in the file system in the users account under /Library/Mail/mailboxes/…

Another major difference, is that mail messages and attachments are stored as files in OSX.

What does that mean for you, the MOSX user?

- you can copy these off to an archive volume by dragging & dropping, similarly they can be restored to your normal mail setup the same way;  Drag and Drop, requires you to simply open the ~/Library/Mail folder, and drag the mail folder to new location.  Your backup is complete.

- In Leopard, you can just right click, and choose archive, and choose export all subfolders.

- if you have moved old mail to another volume for archival reasons, double clicking a message will open it directly in Mail

- if you use Time Machine or similar for backup, each incremental backup only needs to copy the changes to your mail each time (ie what has been received/sent). if you are using outlook or Entourage the whole database gets copied every time it changes.  Microsoft has not indicated that this will change in future versions of Entourage / Outlook.

Now to answer the original question.  How do you create a subfolder?

From the MailBox Menu, choose “New Mailbox”.   A new dialog window will appear, containing “Location”, and a field for the mail folder’s name.  The “On My Mac” location literally means on your macintosh.

— Updated 8/2/2009 to add Leopard’s Mail Right click option, and to clarify drag and drop exporting.

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