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Macintosh: Backing Up Your Email

If you use "IMAP" and leave all of your messages on the email server, all of your email is automatically backed up.

However, most people store many of their older email messages "locally" on their computer hard drives.  This means that if the hard drive fails, all of the old messages and accompanying attachments will be lost.  Make a habit of backing up the directories described here regularly, whether to your folder on the file server, or to some other storage device.

Apple Mail: OS X.4 (Tiger)

The location of mail files for the version of Mail that comes with OS X.4 (Tiger):

• [Macintosh HD] : Users : [Mac login name] : Library : Mail : Mailboxes
  contains all of your locally stored mail.  If you use IMAP, you will see folders called "IMAP-[email username]".  There is no need to backup these folders as they contains copies of what resides on the mail server.
• [Macintosh HD] : Users : [Mac login name] : Library : Mail Downloads
  contains all of the attachments you have received.  This may amount to a great many files that consume a great deal of space.  If you have them stored elsewhere, there is no need to backup this folder.

Apple Mail: OS X.2 (Jaguar) and OS X.3 (Panther)

[Macintosh HD] : Users : [Mac login name] : Library : Mail : Mailboxes
contains all of your locally stored mail.  If you use IMAP, you will see folders called "IMAP-[email username]".  There is no need to backup these folders as they contains copies of what resides on the mail server.  Attachments are stored within the files that end with .mbox, which are Macintosh "packages" (files that look like a file, but actually themselves contain many files).

Mozilla Thunderbird

[Macintosh HD] : Users : [Mac login name] : Library : Thunderbird

Microsoft Entourage

In Microsoft Office 2004's version of Entourage, back up this file:

[Macintosh HD] : Users : [Mac login name] : Documents : Microsoft User Data : Office 2004 Identities : Main Identity : Database