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Moving Mac Mail messages to my iPad

iMonther

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Is there an app or any way to move the Mac Mail local messages from "On My Computer" folder on my Mac to my iPad mail or any other iPad mail app?


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twerppoet

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It is going to depend on whether your email account is POP3, IMAP, or Exchange based. If it is POP3, then all you can have are local folders on your computers and devices.

Both IMAP and Exchange can host their folders on a server, and the clinet (Mac or iPad) syncs those folders.

On the Mac, go into the user accounts, select the account, and choose the mailbox behavior tab. Change each mailbox type (Inbox, Drafts, Trash, Sent, etc.) so that it is pointed as a server folder instead of a local folder. In the mail client itself, you should be able to drag or move emails from the old, local folder to the new server folder (if needed).

My iMac is taking it's sweet time booting, so description the are from memory, and may not be exact. You might have to create a folder on the server, but chances are there is already an appropriate folder to use. (Junk and Spam folders should be considered interchangeable).

On the iPad go to the Account's advanced settings. Again you will find mailbox behaviors. Change them to the same server folders as you did for the Mac.

Once both the computer and iPad (and any other devices you own) are pointed at the same folders they should stay in sync.

The screenshots shown are from an iCloud account. Different folder options may be available for different account types.

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If that's not enough detail to find what you need, say so and I can provide more detailed step-by-step instructions.
 
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iMonther

iMonther

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Thanks twerppoet for the reply, actually your advise is not moving the emails to my iPad, it's rather moving them to a server where I would be able to sync them to any of my devices, that if I understand you correctly.
Unfortunately, this approach is not working for me as I'm talking about 20+ GB worth of email messages, my exchange server is 500MB capacity, I can use other IMAP servers like my iCloud which is 200GB, but it will be a huge BW and will take like forever.

I was looking for a way of moving them to my iPad directly, similar to PST Mail (which works for PST files only unfortunately).


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twerppoet

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Sorry. I don't know of any way to do that. Mail has some limited local email folder capability, but it's really a mobile client at heart; not an email archive tool.

You might find some PST tools in the app store. I haven't looked lately, but there used to be a couple. They were purely archive tools, not mail clients, and I'm not sure how well they worked.

(Just realized that PST Mail is probably one of those apps I was thinking of)

There is an Outlook email client for the iPad. It's worth looking at anyway. I've heard a few bloggers praise it; though not for the feature that you are asking about.
 

twerppoet

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A little looking around made me realize my comments about pst files were pointless. Mail on the Mac won't export to pst, and pretty much every tool I can find for converting pst files converts them to other formats. It appears no one is interested in converting email folders to pst; or maybe it's a licensing issue with Microsoft.

And I can't find any mbox tools similar to the pst archive tools.

The only other solution I can think of is to search the various third party email clients, looking for ones that will both let you create local folders and import the mbox format.

Or perhaps a tool that will export mbox to some text/note based format that you can archive/search; like Evernote or a database.
 
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iMonther

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You are 100% right, most of the MBOX to PST conversion tools are worthless, if not all of them.
I tried many and even purchased couple.
All are incapable of maintaining the inline images of an email.
My huge database are corporate email so the inline images are a deal breaker for me.
Some of them hold it on Apple for keeping changing the Mail standards and protocols with every single release so they are not able to keep up with Apple.

The only reason I'm looking for the MBOX to PST conversion is the PST Mail tool that allows me to take the PST file on my iPad with emails intact and inline images as they should be. But the problem is that it means keeping Windows on parallel desktop VM which I need to get red of for good.

Exporting to Evernote or so will lose the inline images and formats. So I don't want that.

Seems I'm left with no choice but to try your proposal of the IMAP client, which I started to try last night already.
I tried first creating a folder under my iCloud account called "Work", then started to copy messages from "On My Computer" folder to that new IMAP inbox using Mac Mail, the result is quite disappointing as it gives error message "the IMAP command "APPEND" failed with server error: message contains NULL characters"!.
The same message again when I used gmail.
Last I tried using my outlook.com account and it worked, but again not all inline images were there, specially with long emails, it tends to copy couple of inline images and drop the rest, in all messages.

I will continue to try again with iCloud, I trust the echo system far more than the rest, hope it will work, will keep you updated.
And if you have any clue that would help with the error message above, please share.




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iMonther

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Strange thing is ... When I try to move a message from "On My Computer" folder to the IMAP folder it fails giving the error above, while if I try to move the same message from my Exchange inbox to the IMAP folder it works!
Any clue?


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iMonther

iMonther

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Update ...
Instead of using Mac Mail for the move, I tried Outlook for Mac 2016, I've configured my iCloud account on the outlook, imported the original PST files to outlook for Mac.
Copied around 1000 email so far in less than 5 min, seems working with no problems.

For sure this is not the offline viewing experience I was looking for on my iPad, yet at lease my history of corporate emails are now on the cloud accessible from any device I configure to.

Thanks for your support, and please if you came cross any tools that would imitate the PST Mail but for MBOX instead of PST please let me know.

Thanks again.



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