Import Mailboxes into Mail

In this video, we’re going to look at how we import mailboxes into the Mail app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now in an earlier video, I showed you how you could export mailboxes out of your Mail app. Let’s go and revisit that real quick. Let’s go and open up my Mail here. To export a mailbox, all you have to do is just select which mailbox you want to export, so let’s go with my inbox here, this is an individual mailbox. I click on it. I go up under Mailbox in the menu bar, and then we go over to Export. From there, I select where I want to export it out to. And it’ll export that mailbox. Let’s close my mail here.

So I have on my desktop here, this folder called Mailbox Export. I exported a number of different mailboxes. Let’s go ahead and open it up and we can see we have my mailboxes here. I want to import this back into Mail. How do we do that? Well, it’s pretty simple. I’m going to close this window.

Now, we go back down to our Mail here, and to import mailboxes, all we need to do is just go up under File in the menu bar, and then you’re going to see Export Mailboxes, I select this, we have a window that opens up, and from here I select what type of data it is. Now, I exported this out of Mail. So I would naturally select Apple Mail. But you can also import mboxes, which is a standard format. And in all actuality, when you export out of Mail, it does export them as mboxes. If I go back over to my folder here, this has all of my Mailboxes that an exported, you’re going to see that they are mboxes. Now again, I did export this out of Apple Mail, so I’m just going to leave it at Apple Mail, but I could choose files in mbox format because they are an mbox format.

Next thing we do is we go down to Continue. I click on Continue. I select which mailboxes I want to import. I can select just a single mailbox. I could select all of them. If I just wanted to import my inbox, I would select my inbox here. If I wanted to select all of them, I just go hold down the shift key and I select all of them. So we just need to select which mailboxes we want to import.

Now what we do, let’s just go and select our inbox here, now what we do is we go down to Choose. When I click on Choose, it’s going to import that mailbox, my inbox into my Mail app.

Now we’re not done yet once it imports. So let’s go ahead and import this. We have one other step we need to do. I’m going to click on Choose. It is now importing those in. If you have a lot of mail, it could take while. I don’t have a lot of mail so it didn’t take too long. I click on done. Now, if we go over to the side bar, you’re going to see My Inbox. It’s located under Import. Now these imported mail messages here are located only On My Mac. When I imported these into my mail app, it did not associated with any mail account. So I’m not going to find these either on my iCloud account and I’m not going to find them on my Dan’s Tutorials. The only place I am going to find these is on my Mac.

They are not associated with any mail account. If you want to place them in a mail account, you can drag them to that account. Now, before we do that, what you’ll want to do is rename it. Right now this is called inbox. If I drag this over to my iCloud, I already have an inbox, so I don’t really want to have two inboxes. So let’s just go and rename this. I click in here, and I’m just going to call this inbox import. So now I know that this is the inbox that I imported.

So now I’m ready to move these to my new account. So how do we do that? All we have to do is just drag this over to the account we want. So right now, if I were to let go, it would move them over into iCloud. If I want to move it to Dan’s Tutorials, I go down to the bottom here and now it’ll move it to Dan’s Tutorials. So now I want to move these over to my iCloud. I move this over here. I let go. And now it is importing those.

If you have a lot of mail, what you may want to do is go up under Window here and go to your Activity. This opens up a new window and you can see the activity right now. It is copying messages. So it’s copied about 35 out of 376 so far. So if you have a lot of mail, this could take awhile, but once it is done, you’re going to be able to access that mailbox from all of your different devices in that account. In my case, I’m going to be able to access my inbox here, my inbox import, from my iCloud account. You can see why I renamed it. I do not want to have two inboxes there.

Now, it place it down here. I want to move this back up under inbox. All we have to do is just click and drag. It’s just another mailbox. And now I have it under inbox. Now, once it finishes copying here, what you can do then is you can delete these mailboxes here because now they are going to be in your other account. As we can see here, it is copying them. So it’s making duplicates. So now once this is done, I no longer need to have this inbox import because I have it down here and my mail account.

To delete it. All we have to do is just select it, and then let’s go ahead and close this here, I have it selected here. All I have to do is just go up under Mailbox and then you’re going to see delete. Now, if you do have nested mailboxes, you may have to do this a couple of times because it can only delete one mailbox at a time. And then of course, once you’ve deleted from here, what you can do is delete your exports because they’re now in your Mail app. So you no longer need to have them here, unless you want to keep them as a backup.

So that’s how you import mail into the Mail app on the Mac. All you have to do is just go up under File in the menu bar and then select Import Mailboxes. If you exported your mail from the Mail app earlier, you can just leave it at Mail app. If you’ve exported out of a different client, then you want to select mboxes. Once you select what type of files the export files were, you just click on Import and it’ll import your mail. If you have a lot of mail, it may take a little bit. Once it’s done importing, you’re going to find it in the sidebar. It’s only going to be on your Mac. That mail is not going to be associated with any other mail account. It’s only going to be found on your Mac. Your next step is to rename the folder. Once you rename it, you can drag it to one of your other accounts. Once you drag it to one of your other accounts, it will move all of that mail into your mail account, such as your iCloud account or Gmail account. Once it’s done copying, you can then delete that mail, that imported mail. You can also delete it from your Mac.

So that’s how you import mail into the Mail app on the Mac.