Does Mac Mail store E-mails locally on my hard drive?

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Does Mac Mail store E-mails locally on my hard drive?

Hi

Have searched many posts but can't quite seem to find a straight answer to this...

I use Mac Mail with several different email accounts, some virgin.net, some Gmail, plus others. They are all set as IMAP accounts. So my question is - does the OS save copies of these emails on the hard drive?

I found the folder ~/Library/Mail/V6/Mailboxes/ which has several different folders totalling about 4GB so I presume this is all of my emails stored locally. But I want to double check because virginmedia are about to close one of my email accounts (I know this has been happening a lot) and I want to know if there will be a stored copy of the emails on the HD.

I'm aware I can archive emails 'On My Mac' but I'd just like to know if copies of emails are stored locally at the point when they are downloaded from the server, and if these can then be imported back into mac mail at a later point

Thanks!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Mac mini (2018)

Posted on Oct 13, 2024 10:16 AM

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Answer 1

John Cooney Author

Level 1

5 points

Oct 13, 2024 11:31 AM in response to AlWeir

Many thanks for the reply. I realise they are on the imap server but virginmedia are about to delete the account so I will lose the emails on the server. When you say 'depending on how you have set up Mail' what does that mean - is there a particular way to do it? I just set it up by adding accounts one by one but didn't do anything particular - do I need to select a specific option to store them locally?

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