You may see yourself in the situation like you use Gmail/iCloud or another online mail service and all your emails are happily stored in the cloud. But sometimes you want to save some of these emails before cleaning, and the huge amount of emails that you accumulate makes it very uncomfortable to find them if you do not have them located in any way.
A solution to this may be to store those emails locally using Mail, creating a mailbox where you can save mail when you need it. It is relatively simple, and also these mailboxes can be treated like any other file. Now, it is very easy to create local mailboxes using mail and saving them on your Mac. Let's see how it's done.
The easiest: treat mailboxes as folders
To start you should have the email account that we configured in Mail, which you can do in the wizard that appears if you use Mail for the first time or through the Internet Accounts panel of the System Preferences. When we do this, all mailboxes and different sections of that email account will appear in the Mail sidebar.
Something important that you have to know not to be confused is that the mailboxes are nothing more than folders that store emails, as simple as that. There are smart ones, such as the inbox where the emails you receive and the mailbox where the emails you send. Each email, of course, is a file. There are also 'simple', folders that you can create yourself where to store emails manually.
The mailboxes (or folders) that Mail shows you are synchronized from the cloud of the mail service that you use, but we are interested in creating a local mailbox. For this, what we will do is go to the Mailbox menu and click on "New Mailbox":
A dialogue window will appear where we will select the option that we want our mailbox on our Mac (On My Mac), and we will give it a name. We will have our mailbox in the sidebar, in the section 'On my Mac' where the locally stored mailboxes that we create will appear. The rest of the mailboxes, which in this case are in the 'iCloud' section, are synchronized online:
We can drag emails into that mailbox manually (or create a rule to be automatically made according to the criteria you want). The mailbox has no more limit than the free space you have on your computer.
Exporting mailboxes to Mac in a couple of clicks
And if we want to export that mailbox to save it, say, on an external disk and thus have a backup copy of our most important emails? Well, no problem, we can do it with the context menu of the mailbox itself:
We will only have to select a folder where we want the mailbox to be exported and that's it. It will be saved in .mbox format and can be managed like any other file that we store in Finder:
This format can be used by some other clients (Thunderbird, for example), but the best thing is that you can recover them using Mail again. If you plan to import those emails using another application, I recommend doing a test before to verify that it is done without errors and look for alternatives in case that happens.
That is it! This is how we create local mailboxes using mail and save emails on Mac. If you have any other queries let us know in the below comment box and we will get back to you to solve all your questions with the best solution we got.
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