Email Archiver came across my desk the other day, and got me to thinking about my backups and archives. Well, mostly about my email archives. I have mail archived going back decades. But now that I think about it, are all of those old emails actually readable? Some of them are from mail clients that no longer exist. While I can recover the email files, can I actually read them?
Email Archiver
The answer for me is yes, I can always extract the plain text from within the mail files. But that's not a very good way to archive emails. A better solution comes from Spot Documents, maker of Email Archiver. Email Archiver creates PDF copies of your emails. The PDF includes the email headers, as well any attached documents and images. And since they are PDFs, they can be searched easily, as well as opened and viewed with any PDF reader.
Email Archiver doesn't make any changes to your existing mail. Instead, you just drag the current email folder (in my case, that's ~/Library/Mail) to the Email Archiver icon in the Dock. You can also choose just a subset of your Mail directory to archive.
When Email Archiver is done, you will find a new Archive folder in your Documents folder that contains all the PDFs.
Email Archiver is $9.99 and is available from the Mac App Store.
See other software choices from Tom's Mac Software Picks.