Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Today let me show you a better way to save important email messages.
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So all too often I hear people saving important email messages to special mailboxes or folders
inside of the Mail app.
I don't think this is the best place to save important emails or even not so important
emails that you want to refer to once in awhile.
A better way to do it is to save them as files.
You'll have more control over files saved to your hard drive than you do to email saved
in the Mail app.
This is because typically email is caught inbetween being on your computer and being
on the email service that you use.
Email services all work a little different.
iCloud is a little different than gmail, is different that Yahoo and is different than
your local ISP.
You can choose to get email in different ways.
Syncing with the server using something like iMap or downloading everything using POP.
Then your email is only available on your Mac.
You can't view it on other devices.
Then I hear of people upgrading or changing their email service or changing the app they
use and then loosing the email that they've carefully curated and put in certain places
in the Mail app.
When I get an important email I don't keep it in the Mail app.
I export it and save it as a file.
I have a lot of control over my files.
I can organize them in folders.
I could put them in the Cloud and view them across devices.
I can choose from several different ways of exporting email and save the message in an
appropriate way.
Let's look at the different ways you can export email from the Mail app and how easy it is.
Then how you can organize your important messages this way rather than inside of Mail.
I have a bunch of examples here for us to look at from email with just some basic text
information to some email with complex images and layout.
Some receipts and an email with some very important information in a complex layout
that you definitely want to save as is.
Now there are basically three different ways to export messages from Mail.
If you go to File, Save As, you'll see three of those.
The first one is Raw Message Source which sounds like it's really techy and not very
useful.
But it, in fact, saves things out in a .eml format.
Standard format.
By default that will open back up in Mail and display the email just as it was originally
looked.
It's exactly the same as saving it in a mailbox in Mail and then viewing it again except that
you have a separate file that you control that sits on your hard drive instead of buried
deep down in some sort of email library.
You can also export in Rich Text Format which will strip out some more complex layout and
other elements.
These can be viewed in just about any app that views text.
For instance you can use TextEdit to view these.
Third you've got Plain Text which will strip out images and any layout and keep just the
text information.
So if you have a message that just has plain text in it this is the most compact and most
compatible format for you to save out of it.
Now the fourth option is to go to File and Export as PDF.
When you do that you get a PDF file and that can be opened in Preview or any PDF reader
and will attempt to keep all of the layout and design and images and everything in the
email.
However because email uses HTML and HTML prints different than what is seen on the screen
you're not always going to get the same look.
As a matter of fact a lot of important emails come with a different design for printing
than for viewing on the screen so when you go to print it you see something that looks
better on paper.
Well saving as a PDF is actually going to get you that printed version which may not
be what you want.
You also could get a PDF by going to File, Print and then selecting PDF here.
The results will more or less be the same as exporting as PDF.
So let's look and see how this works in practice.
Here we have in the Finder my Documents folder and I have all sorts of folders for organizing
all of my stuff.
I have some folders that are very useful for storing some of these saved emails.
So, for instance, I have a saved email folder.
Let's go and save this very simple email to that.
I could go to File, Save As and since this is just text I could say Plain Text and let
me save that to this saved email folder here.
I'll just drag that into the location.
Hit Save and I'll get this email here saved as text.
If I double click it it'll open up in TextEdit and you can see plain text here is just what's
in there.
So any graphics would have been stripped out.
But for this email it's probably fine.
The advantage to saving it that was is that I can view it very easily without opening
it up in Mail again.
I don't even have to have Mail running.
Now I can also try Save As but I'm going to change the format to Rich Text Format and
I'll save it out.
Now I'm going to get a RTF file.
When I open that in TextEdit it looks a little bit nicer.
The links are clickable.
It's going to keep formatting bold text and things like that and the file size really
isn't going to be that much larger.
So this is probably a better option.
Now if I save it out as a Raw Message Source it's going to save as .eml.
Now I don't actually need to go and use that menu command for that.
I can just drag and drop.
If I drag and drop this over there it will save out the .eml automatically.
So now I get an eml file.
The eml file, when I double click it, actually opens up in Mail and recreates the email just
as I originally saw it.
Better yet it will open up in other email apps as well.
So if in the future you're not using Mac Mail at all, maybe you're not even using a Mac,
eml files should still open up in whatever app you're using.
For instance I could open this up in Thunderbird or something.
Now let's look at this more complex email here.
If I try to save this out as plain text obviously I'm not going to get very much.
If I look at it here you can see this is what it looks like.
If I save it out as Rich Text Format it will look a little bit nicer but still nothing
like the original email.
If I save it out as Raw Message Source or simply drag and drop it then I'll get this
eml file.
If I double click on that it looks exactly like the original.
Now I can also go and Export as a PDF.
If I do that I get a PDF file that will open up in Preview not in Mail and in this case
it looks pretty good.
But other email messages may not look as good.
So you should definitely test when you do an export in PDF to see what the result is.
So now you see the different ways you can export from Mail.
Organization is the next step.
So I have a saved email folder here.
That may not be the best way to do it.
A better way to do it would be to have folders for important things like say receipts.
So if I have a receipt, like say this one here, I can easily drag and drop that in there
and I'll get the receipt saved as an eml file.
I can open it up whenever I want and view it in Mail.
Likewise I have a travel plans folder and for this airline itinerary it's useful to
drag that out and save that as an eml file.
This may be a good use of exporting as a PDF because then I can open that up easily in
anything and view it very quickly with QuickLook even.
Now a few things to note.
EML seems to be the ideal format for saving email messages.
But you run into a problem with trying to view them on your iPhone or iPad.
You can't look at those eml files.
They just appear as data files and you can't see inside them.
However if you search the iOS app store you can find some good apps that will allow you
to view eml messages.
But this is one good reason to go to PDF's for important things like travel documents
because you can easily view them on your iPhone and iPad and your Mac's.
If you have to forward them to somebody or view them on somebody else's device it's easy
to view a PDF like that.
But keep in mind you can store things as eml files and then easily open them up and export
them as a PDF if you need to in the future.
Also note that you can get a lot better with your organization than this simple example
that I showed you.
You could have all sorts of subfolders to save different types of email.
You can name the files whatever you want so that will help in searching for things and
identifying what the message is before you even look at it.
You can also use all sorts of other finder tricks such as tags to help organize your
email files.
This is also great for archiving and backing up these important email messages.
You can clearly see that they're backed up.
You can easily drag and drop them to an archived drive and see that you have them.
So there are a lot of good reasons for adapting this kind of strategy for saving your important
emails rather than leaving them in the Mail app.