If you are a long time reader of this blog, you are probably thinking, “What? Mac? I thought he used Windows and Linux?” Well, you are right. However, where I serve during the day, and wee hours, had a MacBook Pro that was not in use. Rather than having it sit on the shelf, I decided to try to make it my daily driver for a while to really give it a test drive and attempt to determine if in fact there was any benefit to the cost for the things I do. During this time, I figured I post things I’ve learned or found that have been beneficial or a complete failure.
So why Snow Leopard? Because that’s what came on this machine. 
I’m too cheap to purchase the upgrade personally unless I ended up having this assigned as my permanent organizationally assigned laptop. Work with what you got I say. For those of you on Lion, yes, I know that the built-in Mail.App now has archive built-in. Yippee.
Now, for Snow Leopard Mac folks. Coming from Linux (Thunderbird) and Windows (MS Outlook), local archiving of email is something I’ve done for so long, I don’t know how to manage email without it. It seems that someone always ends up asking a question about something months or even years ago and is quickly found via archived emails, provided you have a good search tool.
Lo and behold, I was astounded to not find an Archive feature in Mac Mail.app on Snow Leopard. A quick Google search and a few forum posts and I found a solution that seems to be working well. Archive, a button for Mail.App was to ticket. A quick and easy installation that only required a restart of the Mail.app.
By default, the archive tool archives to a folder called Archive in the mail account itself. So for us IMAP folks, that’s and Archive folder on the server. What I needed was to archive to a local store so I didn’t hit my mailbox quota on the sever. In order to change this setting. Opening a terminal window I ran the following:
defaults write com.apple.mail ArchiveDestination "Local"
Then all that is needed is a restart of the Mail.app. Upon restarting the application I see that there is now an Archive button and new menu items for archiving individual messages or an entire mailbox.
Now, I can archive like the packrat I am and be happy. The best part is that the local archive mailbox is exposed to Spotlight so quick searches are fully integrated.
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