Setup - Plans

A plan allows you to conveniently save frequently-used templates for later use. You must have at least one plan but you can use multiple plans. The list of plans is on the left side of the plan area. Click on the plus icon to create a plan. The minus icon deletes a plan. Each plan has 4 sub-areas:

• Email Info: select email clients/IMAP accounts and their mailboxes for archiving.
• Options: restrict archiving with different options.
• Delete/Move to Trash: optionally delete emails or move them to the trash after archiving.
• Archive Format: select how and where your emails will be saved.

Email Info

Click on the plus icon in the Email Info sub area to add an email client or IMAP account to the plan. Remember that you have to add IMAP accounts in the Accounts area before you can add them to a plan. Clicking on the plus icon will show you a list of available email clients and accounts. You can add one account at a time to a plan.

The following email clients are supported:

• Mail
• Outlook
• Postbox
• Thunderbird

Click on the Add button to add the email client or IMAP account to the plan. Each email account or IMAP account can only be added once to a plan. But you could add the same email client or IMAP account to another plan. If you haven't created the IMAP account, yet, then click on "Create IMAP account..." to create the account from here.

Now the mailboxes will be loaded:

You can either archive all mailboxes or you can select mailboxes. When you add an account or email client "Archive all Mailboxes" is selected by default:

After changing from "Archive all Mailboxes" to "Select mailboxes individually" you can select or exclude individual accounts or mailboxes:

Clicking on a selected mailbox again excludes the mailbox from archiving. The mailbox now shows a minus:

When you see a triangle in an account of an email client then not all attachments may have been downloaded to the computer. You will also get a warning in the AppLog. Imap account always download all attachments.

In case you want to archive spam or trash emails be sure to activate these mailboxes:

You can now start archiving by clicking on the icon with the truck. You can either archive the selected plan or all active plans.

Options

The sub area Options gives you options to restrict the archival of emails by date.

With "Archive in Range" the archival of emails can be restricted to a range of dates or ages. In the above screenshot you will archive every email between 01-Jan-2025 and 31-Dec-2025.

You can select if you want to have an upper/lower date or a date range for archival. You can either edit the date directly or with the date picker. For a range of days the interface is similar:

Here you enter an age range. The date belonging to the age is shown next to the age. If you want to archive all emails older than a year you would select Older than and then 365.

You can also select to archive only new emails with "since last archival date". Newly selected mailboxes will be archived completely. Afterwards only new emails will be added. The date of the last archival date will be shown.

Important: Before emails are moved to the trash for email clients and deleted for IMAP accounts there is a check that the email is in the archive. The archive is NOT affected by moving emails to the trash for the email client/deleting emails from IMAP. In the archive you have to manually drag emails to the trash and empty the trash.

"Download remote images" downloads images from external servers. Don't do this with spam emails. This option makes archiving a bit slower.

Archive emails with flag: this option can only be used when archiving from Mail. Archive emails with the selected flag or exclude them from being archived.

Archive duplicate Emails in multiple mailboxes: by default, Mail Archiver filters out duplicate emails. If the option "Archive duplicate emails" is enabled, duplicate emails will no longer be filtered out when they are present in multiple mailboxes. This makes archiving slower and increases the size of the archives.

With "Update mailbox of archived Emails" it is also possible to update the mailbox for archived emails. Let’s say you archived an email from your Inbox. Afterwards, you moved the email to another mailbox in your email client or account. With this option, the mailbox in the archive will be updated to the new mailbox.

You can use either "Archive duplicate Emails" or "Update mailboxes," but not both. The options are only available for the Internal Database.

Delete/Move to Trash

Mail Archiver X can move your emails to the trash of the email client after archival.

• No email deletion: emails won't be deleted/moved to the trash at all.
• Delete emails in the same date/day range as for archiving: uses the settings from the Options area to delete/move emails to the trash.
• Delete emails in range: similar to the date or day range for archiving deleting/moving to the trash can be done in a date or day range.

For IMAP the emails will be deleted. For an email client the emails are moved to the trash. If you made an error you can still restore the emails. However, the original mailbox can't be recovered. Also, if your email client is set to automatically delete emails after a certain amount of days your emails may be deleted automatically. The following screenshot shows this option for Mail:

The emails can be colored instead of being moved to the trash - but only for AppleMail. This is done with the option "Only color emails".

Archive Format

With Archive Format you can select your main format: Internal Database (Valentina - a fast database by Paradigma Software), MBOX or PDF. The Easy version can only use Internal Database. You can always export your data to another format when you archive to Internal Database. For each format click on the grey button to show the archive location in Finder.

Options for Internal Database:

The Internal Database is the default storage option for Mail Archiver. The database saves all your emails in 2 files (an additional file is opened when the database is open).

With the Select button you can select an existing archive. The dropdown menu selects from predefined locations like the User or User Documents folder. With the New button you can create a new archive. The archive then will be created as soon as archival starts.

For the Easy version you can archive only to the Internal Database and you can't change the location of the archive.

Important: If you decide at any point in time not to use Mail Archiver X any longer you can access your raw data via the mbox export!

Options für MBOX:

With the MBOX format it is possible to create a simple backup mainly for IMAP accounts. There is only the option to specify the storage location of the archive. With the dropdown menu, you can select a subfolder of the Documents folder, the User folder, or the Desktop with a single click.

Options for PDF:

PDF is a mostly read-only format from Adobe. With “Select,” you can specify the folder for the PDF files. With the dropdown menu, you can select a subfolder of the Documents folder, the User folder, or the Desktop with a single click. The PDF export creates one PDF file for each email. There are two options: You can either export all emails into one folder. Or each email gets it's own folder. With Template you can select if you want to print the email with or without header information. There is also an option, if you want to include the attachments in the export. The final option is about the separator between the 2 parts of the name. The name can be "Subject, Date", "Subject", "Date, Subject", "Originator, Date" or "Date, Originator".

You can add your own templates to user/Library/Application Support/Mail Archiver X/Print Templates. An example template is in the Extras folder.

The folder structure of the PDFs in Finder reflects the mailboxes of the email client, IMAP account or mbox files. The below screenshot shows the mailboxes from Mail:

The Finder shows the same mailbox structure. The main folder is "Mothsoftware-test". Then below there are folders with the long mailbox names I use for testing. The PDFs are in the folder "Mails":

Mail Archiver does not have the capability to view or search PDFs. But there are enough apps available which can do this. For instance:

• DEVONThink from Devon Technologies
• EagleFiler from C-Command

If you want to learn more about how to use the app with Mail Archiver check out the blog and search for the app name.