Archiving smart mailboxes?

Morning.
Is it possible to archive the content of a smart mailbox?
TIA and kind regards, Friedrich

I believe you have to delete them. Mail just archives the mailbox as it is. You can archive old stuff by creating a smart mailbox that only shows items before a certain date (one month ago, for instance), but then you'll have to delete the files yourself. I think you might be able to set something up with Automator so it will archive and then delete the files, but I'm not sure.

Similar Messages

Archiving smart mailbox not complete

I am using Mail version 3.6 on my PowerMac G4 running 10.5.8.
Archiving a smart mailbox with more than 2200 mails results in a mbox file with only slightly more than 800 mails. I haven't figured out yet what the 800 saved mails have in common, compared to the total of 2200. The smart mailbox has 2 rules, one searching for a single word in the message and another rule to include all senders in an address book mail group.
Did anyone experience something similar and what found out what the cause was?
With kind regards,
Gerard

I must admit that I was surprised as I suspect many would like to archive in this way - it may be a bug.
I have found a workaround for you.
Create a new mailbox
Highlight all items in smart box - cmd A
Copy to new mailbox - right click on highlighted mails and select new mailbox
Archive new mailbox
Drag appears to work for 3 but do a test run first.
I hope this helps

Archiving Smart Mailbox Messages

Is there a way to archive only the messages in a Smart Mailbox (alternatively, archive only selected messages).
Thank you

Why do I need to post a comment or a follow-up before I can mark a question as answered? That's silly.

Moving messages from a Smart Mailbox into an On My Mac folder for archiving

I'm trying to find a way to (as automatically as possible) archive emails. I'm using IMAP and I want to try to get the messages off the server and onto my laptop because it takes too much time and CPU cycles for Mail to tell the IMAP server to do all the grunt work, especially when I have upwards of 100,000 emails on the IMAP server. I've considered switching to POP3, but I've decided that IMAP is still the best solution, taking other issues into consideration as well.
I've looked at Mail Scripts, but it doesn't have the functionalty I want (namely it doesn't work with Smart Mailboxes, nor can do you have the same level flexibility of specifying dates and such as a Smart Mailbox does.
What I've come up with is I've created a Smart Mailbox which lists all messages older than 3 months (these are the messages I want to archive). I've also created an On My Mac folder where I would like to store all the archived email. My problems are:
1) How can I move the emails from the Smart Mailbox into the On My Mac folder?
2) The move of the messages should be done by Mail itself, otherwise, unless there is a way to automate the process, I will have to tell Mail to manually rebuild the On My Mac folder or else the messages that have been copied to the On My Mac folder will not be viewable in Mail, nor with they be caught by other Smart Mailboxes.
Anyone have any brilliant suggestions, or perhaps another way to do this all together?
Thanks in advance...

Why do I need to post a comment or a follow-up before I can mark a question as answered? That's silly.

Archiving a Smart Mailbox to a RAW Message Source using Automator?

In MAIL I can set a smart mailbox to say get emails from ("any" recipient contains [email protected])
But in Automator when I use the Filter messages in mail I can't be that broad with my selection, I can only select sender, and not ANY recipient. Be that someone cc'd with that email address, the sender or reciever.
One way around this is allowing Automator to select a Smart Mailbox from MAIL to do the selecting.
But I can't get Automator to select a Smart Mailbox.
What I need to do is take my Smart Mailbox content and every X# of days, for my needs it would be 7 days, export out last X# of days, again for me its 7 days, worth of emails as a RAW Message Source and append it to an existing RAW Message Source file in a specified folder.
Or if appending to an existing file is not possible then create individual files but name them something like, Weekending_10_282006, where the date in file name matches the day the script was run.
Then place this to always run on a Saturday.
I am using this to backup messages for specific projects at work. And I would like to use it to backup emails from my cousin who is serving overseas in Iraq.
Thank you for your help.
Ed Walsh
Mac Mini Intel duo Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2gb ram, 120gb hard drive

Back up all data.
Triple-click the line below on this page to select it:
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SmartMailboxes.plist
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Reveal
from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Quit the application if it's running. Move the selected item to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Relaunch the application, create some smart mailboxes, and test. If there's no change, quit again and put the item you moved back where it was, overwriting the one that may have been created in its place. Otherwise, delete the item you moved.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C). In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

Is there any way to have a smart mailbox search sub-folders

My wife uses Mail.app for her business in which gets hundreds of emails a day and managing them all is quite a challenge. One important goal of e-mail management is archiving certain emails in folders (and sub-folders) without creating duplicates. What I've done is to create rules to move e-mails into their respective the folders and flag them based varying criteria. This works great!
The problem is when I make a smart mailbox to include only flagged messages in a specific mailbox, only messages in the root mailbox are found. All messages in the sub-folder are ignored or never considered. I used the "not in mailbox" option on my own mail.app but this isn't practical for her because she manages numerous e-mail accounts for clients and she adds new accounts frequently.
Is there a solution to my issue that doesn't involve puting all the messages into the root mailbox?

Mine are showing emails in subfolders, but I don't have near that many emails.
Maybe you need to reindex the spotlight database.
The normal method is to add the Hard drive to the Privacy tab in Spotlight prefs. If that doesn't cause it to index, here is a Terminal way: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_reindex_spotlight

Can I sync Mailboxes? Or do they need to be Smart Mailboxes?

Hi all,
Awhile back (sometime during OSX 10.3 or so), I set up several different mailboxes in Mail to help me organize my emails. For example, I have one mailbox dedicated to receipts that have been emailed to me, which I keep indefinitely for tax purposes. Another mailbox is for a certain email discussion list I belong to, in which I keep certain emails with information I'd like to keep on hand.
Now, fast forward to today. I use both my G4 iMac and my Intel iMac to check for mail. And, of course, my inboxes are perfectly synchronized. However, not so with my mailboxes. For example, if, on my G4, I drag an emailed receipt from my inbox to my "receipts" mailbox, the email doesn't show up at all when I open up Mail on my Intel iMac, since it's no longer in my Inbox. So, there's no way to access the receipt from that computer. I have to boot up my G4 iMac to access that particular email.
Is there a way to sync my mailboxes up? Or do I need to periodically archive my mailboxes on one computer and restore those archives on my other computer to do a type of "manual sync" between the two computers?
Or, should I just change them all over to Smart Mailboxes? Smart Mailboxes will sync up automatically won't they? And I can drag emails from my inbox to a smart mailbox, right?
Thanks for your help!
Kevin

The answer should actually be in your Mail's built in Help system.
Assuming you're using a MobileMe email account it's very easy to keep your folders in sync as long as you use IMAP. I may be wrong but it sounds like the mailboxes you're trying to sync are in fact stored on your Mac and not in the server. in the list of mailboxes in Mail do you see the mailboxes listed under "MY MOBILEME" or "ON MY MAC"?
Smart mailboxes are just mailboxes that automatically gather together emails that match the criteria specified by you.
In Apple Mail Help search for "mailboxes" for lots of info about mailboxes, including syncing. Also search for "IMAP" if you don't know what that is.
If you're using another email service other than MobileMe then you can still do the automatic syncing of mailboxes if IMAP is supported. Gmail for example supports it.

Mail: ANY doesn't work in smart mailboxes or rules?

I want to create a smart mailbox that will copy and archive all messages to/from a particular recipient and e-mails to/from others about the subject of most of the conversation with that recipient. I want the archiving to happen as they arrive in my inboxes and not automatically remove them from the servers--some I still need on the servers to access from multiple locations/machines.
But I can't even get to the archiving issue: the smart mailbox that says 'contains ANY message' meeting these rules:
contains recipient1
contains subject2
always has fewer messages than one that simply 'contains recipient1' so the ANY condition, that in boolean terms should be an OR combination, appears to functionally act as an AND.
When I tried to create a smart mailbox folder to contain two mailboxes, one for contains name1 and one for contains subject2, each of which separately works fine, clicking the smart mailbox folder containing both leaves the window empty, so I can't see the messages name1 and subject2 interlaced in the date sent order or any other. I just get one group or the other by clicking the submailboxes.
And trying to bypass the problem using rules doesn't work either--the 'any' command is as dysfunctional there as it is in the smart mailbox dialog. I can manually search for the relevant terms (recipient1 and subject2) and option+drag them to a mailbox for archiving, but this results in many duplications, especially if repeated over time, not a happy result.
Some searching here and googling suggests that the ANY command is problematic in this OS for a lot of people, but is there a known fix? Or a better way to create a 'smart' archive to do what I want?

Okay, I think I understand better now. So I just ran a test, by creating the following rule:
I specifically chose an address (obviously not the one shown) that I had a message from in my Inbox, and a word that was present in the subject line of several messages in my Inbox. When I ran this rule on my Inbox, it copied exactly the messages I would have expected into the test mailbox. Are you seeing different behavior with the same rule, or is your rule constructed differently?
If the difficulty is with running the rule, note that (as I said earlier) rules only run automatically on unread incoming messages. It won't run automatically on existing messages or on messages on an IMAP mail server that you have read on another device using (in which case they will have been marked as read). If you need to run this in such conditions, you'll have to either run the rule manually or run it via an AppleScript or something similar that is somehow (via something other than Mail) made to execute at certain times/intervals or under certain conditions.
And you're correct, a smart mailbox would be totally inappropriate for what you're trying to do! It would behave exactly as you guessed.

Mail present in Mailbox, not showing in Smart Mailbox

OK, this is a bit complicated to explain, but let's try.
To archive old emails, I use to create a Smart Mailbox with criteria, for example, all emails (received or sent) from 01/01/2001 to 31/12/2001.
Then I drag them in a separate mailbox, which I can archive.
As a check, I show on the mail browser the "mailbox" column.
And many mails are reported as "blank" in the Mailbox column.
Worse, when I try to open them, they appear blank, too. No headers, no contents.
But if I do a Spotlight search on the title shown in the browser, I can find the .emlx file, and open it with Text Wrangler. Text Wrangler then give me the path of the file ... which is in the adequate mailbox !! And if I open the file through the result window of Spotlight, Mail decently opens the message ...
Rebuilding the mailboxes doesn't help.
It happens with "small" years (+/- 2000 messages) as well as with "big" years (10,000 messages and above).
Is there a way to rebuild a complete index of Mail ?
Thanks in advance

Claude,
It would appear that you do need to force reindexing. Since forcing reindexing involves more than those On My Mac mailboxes, the issue of what type of accounts you use remains relevant?
To force Mail to reindex, you quit Mail, and in the Finder open Home/Library/Mail and locate the Envelope Index file (hopefully you only find one file with similar name). Drag out, or delete the Envelope Index file from the Mail folder, and then relaunch Mail, which will announce that it is ready to import mailboxes, but really will only set about to index all mailboxes.
Again, if you have anything other than POP accounts, please report that, and if you understand what you are supposed to do with the account folder for non-POP accounts?
Ernie

Smart Mailbox Rundown

How are you using Smart Mailboxes?
My main smart mailboxes:
- All messages with attachments (for finding old attachments / files easily -- especially if you can't remember the name for searches)
- Last 2 weeks of "personal" Inbox
- Last 2 weeks of "business" Inbox
- My last two weeks of Sent (I haven't archived / moved my sent mail from the Sent folder so browsing "Sent" for recent mail can be very very slow)
Anyone out there doing something particularly complicated?

I use them mainly as spam deterrants (sp?)
Anything with the words "viagra" "farm girls" etc. goes straight to trash
Recently, spammers have wisened up and send their message as a .gif attachment. Anything with .gif attachment goes straight to trash
Other smart mailbox:
1) anything with "order" "purchase" goes into "Purchases" mailbox
2) bank related messages go into "banking"
3) I have an iteneraries mailbox for all my flight reservations and hotel reservations

RSS Feeds and a Today Smart Mailbox

How can I have posts from RSS feeds I am subscribed to Not show up in a Today Smart Mailbox?
I tried to add a condition to the smart mailbox but I don't see parameters that would cover not showing the feed posts.

Your Store page is at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/drunkards-and-dragons/id602663440?mt=2
The Store isn't using the feed you linked to, but the one at
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/34731626-drunkdnd/tracks
This has three episodes, all of which play in the Store and the two I checked downloaded on subscribing.
Your feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/drunkdnd has four episodes; it can be subscribed to manually in the Store and the episodes download OK, so I'm not sure what the problem is. However this feed uses different episode media URLs; they are hosted on archive.org and are using https rather than http, and although the iTunes application handles them when subscribing it's possible that the Store itself is baulking at them. It would be better if you could provide a direct http URL to the files.
If you want to move the Store from using the soundcloud feed to the feedburner one you will need to add an 'itunes:new-feed-url' tag to the old feed, containing the URL of the new feed. The process is decribed in detail here:
http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/podcast.html#move

Mail: a curiosity about Smart Mailbox

Hi
as mentioned before, I'm migrating my email from Entourage to Mail and would like to "maintain" some search rules structure. Moving to Mail, I don't find a "parameter/feature" creating searching rules:
When I specify a mailbox to search in (i.e. "Message is in Mailbox"), the search is limited to only this mailbox and not to its "child". This means that if I have a structure like this
Inbox
|
+-- pippo
+-- pluto
and I specify just Inbox as "Message is in Mailbox", the search is performed only in Inbox and not into Pippo and Pluto. I need this feature because I have to exclude in the search an imported mailbox with a lot of sub-mailbox.
Thank you for the support
Daniele

Sounds like you know what you are doing, but just in case...
Smart Mailbox is a virtual view into your inbox and your archive mailbox. Your description of moved emails still showing up in your smart mailbox makes sense since it doesn't care what maiblox the emails are moved from. You can add additional rules to filter out inbox vs archive so you only see new messages from those contacts, but I'm guessing you probably already know this (but just checking in case this is easily solvable).
As for the behavior of select all move to archive forcing already archived emails to vanish you are correct that it sounds buggy.
If your email is Gmail they don't treat archives the same way most IMAP email servers work so you may need to investigate further.
If you can set up your smart mailbox to exclude already archived emails you can probably just avoid this issue all together.
G'luck

How to create "Unread Junk" Smart Mailbox?

I am trying to create a Smart Mailbox that will show all of my unread messages that Apple Mail has marked as junk and moved into junk mail folders. It doesn't seem to work.
You can see from the screenshots below that I have unread junk mail, you can also see that I have a smart mailbox set up to show any unread messages in junk mail, but they don't show up. I thought that changing the selected mailbox from the "parent" all inclusive junk mail mailbox to an individual junk mailbox would fix it, but it didn't work. Any ideas how to set this up so I can see my unread junk mail in a smart mailbox?
Thanks!

I do not use gmail and know next to nothing about it, but you can probably find some help for the two step verification here. You may need to put a password on the app in order for it to work properly.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=two+step+password+gmail&ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8
If you do not see that Edit button in the main mail window like I described, then the email account is not IMAP. I'm not familar with gmail, but I think that it can be set up as IMAP. The edit button that you are seeing may be for you to move email to the trash, or to archive your email. Gmail is a little differnt than what I am used to in the way that it works.
Look for help.
http://support.google.com/mail/?hl=en

Inbox to smart mailboxes

I have set up my smart mailboxes and they are working but the e-mail still will show up in my inbox. If I delete it out of my inbox it will also delete it in my smart mailbox. How do I keep my mail in my smart mailboxes but have it deleted from my inbox so its not full of every e-mail.
Thanks

smart mailboxes is really for filtering and then if you would like, processing email after the filtering, for either replies/delete/move to another mailbox/archiving... so in order to achieve what you want, you would need to manually move the emails you filtered in a smart mailbox to another mailbox or delete, them, then they will be moved from your inbox.
hope this helps

Gmail and other IMAP, smart mailbox for inboxes

Hello,
I have Mavericks, use Mail.app, including 4 active email accounts. I have a smart mailbox that includes any message from 3 of the 4 account inboxes, and I've been using this setup since Snow Leopard. After upgrading to Mavericks, this smart mailbox no longer works properly.
So 2 of the 3 mailboxes included in the smart mailbox are gmail, the third is non-gmail IMAP. The smart mailbox does include the correct messages from all three inboxes together, but it lists the gmail boxes as being from archive (AKA All Mail) instead of Inbox. Apparently Mail.app is doing a message matching between those emails, and preferring the "all mail" version over the inbox version. This didn't seem to be more than an annoyance at first, until I discovered that I can't archive emails from the smart mailbox: I have to go directly to the inbox to archive them, because calling "archive" on an "all mail" message is a No-op.
I beleive this problem is not specific to smart mailboxes, because it happens on search results as well. So
Select gmail inbox
search for a sender in that mailbox only
select some of those messages
click "archive"
The effect is that the messages will disappaer from the current search result, but as soon as I dismiss the search I can see the messages are still in the inbox.
Clearly the enhanced gmail integration was done hastily here.
I don't know if there is a workaround here. Apple must fix!

Oh, and there was one other issue I forgot to mention. When I used this arrangement before Mavericks, the smart mailbox pointing at my inboxes would "live update", so if new mail was received in an inbox and I was looking at the smart mailbox, it would update immediately. This functionality is no longer there.

Archiving smart mailboxes?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for