3.5.1 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 is selected, EagleFiler imports only those messages. To deselect a message (to tell EagleFiler to capture the whole mailbox) you can Command-click on the message.
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.

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.

Importing Multiple Mailboxes

To import multiple whole mailboxes at once, first select the mailboxes in Mail’s sidebar. (Make sure that no messages are selected.) 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 (or make sure that none are selected). Then press EagleFiler’s capture key. It will import all the messages in the mailboxes, as well as any submailboxes.

Importing Message Files

To import multiple messages as individual .eml files instead of as mailbox files, capture one message at a time or use the Import From Apple Mail script. You can also drag and drop individual messages from Mail to EagleFiler. Unlike using the capture key, this will not import message metadata or MailTags into EagleFiler.

Note: It is not recommended to drag multiple messages at once, as on some versions of macOS only the first message will be sent to EagleFiler. There are also some cases where Mail may not save the dragged message to disk, and thus EagleFiler will not be able to import it. You can work around both of these issues by importing using the capture key or by dragging first to the Finder and then from Finder to EagleFiler.

Importing Mailbox Hierarchies

Another way to import from Apple Mail is to drag and drop folders or mailboxes from the Finder. This makes it possible to import whole hierarchies of mail. The mailboxes are stored in the folder:

/Users/<username>/Library/Mail

(See How can I open the Library folder?.) Inside the V10 (or other V# folder for previous versions of macOS) is a folder for each account (named with a UUID or your e-mail address, and inside the account folder a folder for each mailbox.

When importing .mbox folders from Mail, you generally do not want to import via the To Import folder or the Files folder, as this would prevent EagleFiler from converting the mail to the standard mbox format. It is better to drag and drop to the Dock icon or into EagleFiler’s window, or to use the capture key from the Finder.

On macOS 10.14 and later, the first time you import from Mail’s folder you will need to grant EagleFiler Full Disk Access.

Importing via Mail’s File Menu

Yet another way to import from Apple Mail is to use Mail’s File ‣ Save As… menu command. This works even if EagleFiler is not running, and you can select anywhere in The Files Folder or the The To Import Folder to save the file. Be sure to choose Raw Message Source from the Format pop-up menu. If a single message is selected, Mail will save it in .eml format. If multiple messages are selected (and you have macOS 10.12 or later), Mail will save them in mbox format. For larger mailboxes, it may initially look like the save didn’t happen, but Mail will eventually create the file.

Importing Attachments

EagleFiler tries to import complete messages, including any attached files. For messages downloaded from POP mail servers or stored in local (On My Mac) mailboxes, this should always succeed because Mail stores the attachment data with the message. For messages from IMAP and Exchange mail servers, the attachment data may or may not have been downloaded to your Mac.

You can tell Mail that you want it to download the attachments to your Mac. To do this, go to the Accounts pane of Mail’s settings and (for each account) tell it to download the attachments:

macOS 11.0 through 10.12: On the Account Information tab, for Download Attachments choose All. Additionally, do not use the new Optimize Storage OS feature to automatically remove e-mail attachments.
macOS 10.11 through 10.9: Mail always downloads complete messages.
macOS 10.8 and earlier: On the Advanced tab, for Keep copies of messages for offline viewing choose All messages and their attachments.

Note that this is advisory, and Mail may not always store all the attachments on your Mac, especially if disk space is running low. If you try to import a message whose attachments have not been downloaded, EagleFiler will report a Missing Apple Mail Attachment error and import only the non-attachments parts of the message. This is good because it alerts you to a message that needs to be fully downloaded. After following the instructions below to download the message, you can try the import again. Then you’ll end up with a complete offline copy of the message, whereas a Time Machine backup would only contain the parts of the message that Mail was currently caching.

Missing Messages and Attachments

When importing from Apple Mail, EagleFiler may report a Missing Apple Mail Messages or Missing Apple Mail Attachment error. This indicates that the message had not been fully downloaded to your Mac. You should tell Mail to download the messages and then try the import again. There are several ways to do this:

For a small number of messages that are missing attachments, it’s easiest to open the messages for viewing in Mail. This will trigger Mail to fully download them. You can select the error(s) in EagleFiler’s Errors window and Option-click the Reveal button. This opens the message files in Mail. Once the attachments have loaded in the message windows, you can close the windows and then try the import again.
For a larger number of messages, you can select all the messages to import in Mail and run the Download Apple Mail Messages script. Once this has completed, press the capture key with the same messages selected to import them.
For very large numbers of messages, the script can take a while. A faster option is to Option-drag and drop the entire mailbox to the On My Mac section of Mail’s mailbox list. This will create a local copy of the mailbox with all the messages fully downloaded.

Please note that moving or copying an IMAP message to an On My Mac mailbox will not cause Mail to download the attachments. It may, in fact, mark the attachments as downloaded even though they are missing. And if you then open the message it will be disassociated from the IMAP server so Mail will not be able to fetch the attachments. Thus, it’s best to import the IMAP messages directly from their original mailbox so that EagleFiler can warn you if any attachments are missing and Mail can download them if necessary.

Note: Mail does not allow you to copy special mailboxes such as Sent. However, you can temporarily create a Sent2 mailbox and assign that as the special Sent mailbox in the Mailbox Behaviors settings. Then Mail will let you copy the original Sent mailbox, which now appears with a regular icon. This workaround unfortunately does not work for the inbox.

Importing Conversations

If you have View ‣ Organize by Conversation checked, Mail behaves differently depending on whether you have Use classic layout checked in the Viewing settings.

With the classic layout, if you select a message with a blue triangle and the triangle is collapsed, EagleFiler captures all the messages in the conversation from the selected mailbox(es). If the triangle is expanded, EagleFiler captures only the messages that are selected in the message list, even though more messages may be displayed in the message viewer.
With the widescreen layout, if you select a message with a triangle, EagleFiler captures all the messages in the conversation from the selected mailbox(es), regardless of whether the triangle is expanded. (As with the classic layout, you can select individual messages indented below the triangle if you only want to capture those.)

To import both sides of a conversation, Command-click in the mailbox list to select the Sent mailbox as well as the mailbox containing the received messages. Then Mail’s conversation view will show both types of messages in the list. You may also find it helpful to use a smart mailbox to display related messages from different mailboxes, and then capture from the smart mailbox.

Importing an entire mailbox is much simpler. You can always use Edit ‣ Select All to select all the messages, regardless of whether Mail is in conversation mode or which triangles are expanded.

Importing Only Newer Messages

If you’ve previously imported some messages from Mail and now want to do a new import without creating additional copies of the old messages, there are several options:

The simplest solution is to make sure that each message is only stored in one place: Mail or EagleFiler. If you import using the capture key, the imported messages will be selected in Mail. After the import has completed, you can press the Delete key to move them to the trash. Then you won’t have to worry about importing them again the next time.
You can use a smart mailbox in Mail to find all the messages newer than a certain date, i.e. the last time you imported into EagleFiler. Each time you do an import, update the smart mailbox to the latest date.

Importing New Mail Messages Automatically

It’s most efficient to import messages in bulk from Apple Mail, as described above. However, you can also set up a rule in Mail that uses the Import From Apple Mail script to automatically import each new message into EagleFiler as soon as Mail receives it.

Apple Mail “.mbox” Mailboxes

Apple Mail stores its mail in two types of folders whose names end with .mbox, however neither of these uses the actual mbox format:

“Live” .mbox folders contain .emlx files. EagleFiler can import these folders via drag and drop—for best results, drag the whole folder, not the individual files—or by using the capture key from within Mail.
“Archive” .mbox folders can be saved from Apple Mail using the Export Mailbox… command. These contain a single file called mbox. EagleFiler can import these folders via drag and drop, however this is not recommended because Mail does not properly generate the mbox format, attachments may be missing, and the mbox file does not include the message metadata. For better data fidelity it is recommended that you import the mailbox back into Mail and then capture the messages from Mail to EagleFiler, rather than importing archive mailbox to EagleFiler directly.

Capturing When Mail Is Busy

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.

macOS 10.12 and macOS 10.11: You can look in the Activity pane at the bottom of the mailbox list to make sure that Mail is idle. EagleFiler will report an error if it tries to import an e-mail message that was not completely written to disk.

macOS 10.10 and earlier: EagleFiler will report an error if Mail is busy. The Activity window is a more accurate measure of this than the Mail Activity pane in Mail’s main viewer window. If you press the capture key and EagleFiler detects that Mail is busy, it will suggest that you try again later. You can click Cancel and wait until Mail has finished downloading mail or use the Mailbox menu to take it offline. You can also click Capture Anyway to proceed if you know that Mail is not doing anything with the messages that you had asked it to capture.

apple mail activity

Duplicate Messages

When importing from Apple Mail, EagleFiler automatically skips a message if it is an exact duplicate of another message in the same mailbox that is currently being imported. Thus, it can be normal for the mailbox in EagleFiler to show fewer messages than the mailbox in Apple Mail. When EagleFiler skips a message, it includes a line in the note of the imported mailbox to tell you this.

You can click here to have EagleFiler log to Console when it is skipping a duplicate message, or click here to turn off the logging.
You can click here to have EagleFiler not skip duplicate messages, e.g. to more easily verify that the proper number of messages were imported, or click here to skip them again.

Gmail and “All Mail”

When importing from a Gmail account in Apple Mail, the messages may end up in an EagleFiler mailbox called All Mail, even if you had selected the messages in a mailbox of a different name. This happens because the message exists in both mailboxes on the Gmail server, and Apple Mail sometimes saves space by only storing a single copy of the message. It tells EagleFiler that the message is in All Mail, since that’s where it’s storing the message, so that’s the mailbox name EagleFiler uses. You can prevent this from happening by configuring Gmail not to show the All Mail mailbox in Apple Mail:

In Gmail, click on the gear menu at the top right and select Settings.
Click on Labels (which is next to General at the top of the screen).
In the System labels section, uncheck Show in IMAP on the line for All Mail.

When capturing a Gmail message, you may get an error saying that EagleFiler couldn’t find the All Mail mailbox on disk. This happens for a related reason, that Mail is choosing to only store the message in the non-archive mailbox. Hiding All Mail from IMAP will also fix this problem. Or, you can copy the messages to an On My Mac Apple Mail mailbox before capturing them or choose Mailbox ‣ Export Mailbox… and then import the exported file into EagleFiler.

Mail Perspectives

If you have a Mail Perspectives window open (and it’s frontmost), EagleFiler will capture the selected messages from that window, rather than from the regular viewer window.