So how should you archive your email? There are two general approaches: Archiving email locally-perhaps on an annual basis-ensures the long-term preservation of your email communications. Local backup: Although most email providers and businesses back up their servers (and probably better than most users), it’s not inconceivable that you could lose mail stored remotely.Preserving a former employee’s business communications: From the opposite perspective, if an employee of yours leaves, you might want to archive their work email account so you have an easily searched record of what they said to clients or suppliers.Leaving a job or graduating from school: If you have a work or school email account that will be shut down after you leave, you might want to archive all that email beforehand.Switching email providers: If you choose to stop using a particular email account, you might want to download all the mail in it first.Poor email client performance: Although good email apps should be able to handle hundreds of thousands of messages, it’s possible that reducing the amount of email in your account would help if you’re experiencing slowdowns.Reduce clutter: Even if you have sufficient server space, archiving mail-particularly mail from ancient completed projects-might reduce the mental load of having it in your email app.Insufficient server space: Institutional email accounts sometimes have inflexible mail quotas, and although you can pay for more storage on many large email providers, you might prefer instead to clear out old mail that you don’t refer to anymore.However, there are situations where you might want to archive email, by which we mean download it from the server and store it for posterity on your Mac, possibly outside your email app. Email doesn’t take up any physical space and not even that much digital space in the scheme of things.

Before you know it, you have years of email stored away-potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of messages.

Email is a major part of all our lives, both personally and professionally, and as such, it can add up.

Auto archive mac mail