3.6.1 Importing Mail From Apple Mail

Archiving messages from Apple Mail to EagleFiler can speed up Mail and also create a safe offline backup of your messages, as Time Machine backups normally don’t include the full contents of all your messages in Mail.

The recommended way to import from Apple Mail is to select some messages or mailboxes and press the capture key. (By default this is the F1 key, but depending on your Mac’s keyboard settings you may need to press fn-F1.) EagleFiler will copy the entire message (including attachments) to its library, along with the message status and flagged indicators from Mail and any keywords, projects, and notes from MailTags.

If one or more messages are selected, EagleFiler imports only those messages.
If no messages are selected, EagleFiler imports every message in the selected mailboxes as well as all of their submailboxes. In order to capture from Gmail mailboxes or special mailboxes (e.g. smart mailboxes or the special Inbox that contains the other inboxes), you will need to select the messages within them (e.g. using Edit ‣ Select All).

Note: On macOS 10.14 and later, the first time you press the capture key you will need to grant EagleFiler Full Disk Access so that EagleFiler can read Mail’s files.

In order to safely read Apple Mail’s message data, Mail should not be in the process of downloading messages from the server or moving them between mailboxes when you press the capture key. You can look in the Activity pane at the bottom of the mailbox list to make sure that Mail is idle.

Importing Multiple Mailboxes

To import multiple whole mailboxes at once, first select the mailboxes in Mail’s sidebar. You can either Command-click to select individual mailboxes or select a whole range of mailboxes by clicking on the first one and then Shift-clicking on the last one. Once the mailboxes are selected, use the Edit ‣ Select All command to select all the messages. Then press EagleFiler’s capture key. To import a large amount of mail or a mailbox and all of its submailboxes, see Importing Whole Apple Mail Mailbox Hierarchies.

Importing as Message Files

By default, EagleFiler imports a single selected message as a .eml message file and multiple selected messages as a mailbox file. Please see the Importing Mail section for more information about these formats.

To import multiple messages as individual .eml files instead of as mailbox files, you can:

Use the capture key on one message at a time.
Select a group of messages and run the Import From Apple Mail script.
Drag and drop individual messages from Mail to EagleFiler. Unlike using the capture key, this will not import message metadata or MailTags into EagleFiler. It is not recommended to drag multiple messages at once, as on some versions of macOS EagleFiler might not receive all of the messages.