Archiving speed is dependent on many factors like number of emails archived or if you use an old hard disk versus an SSD.
Benefits and drawbacks of archiving from email clients versus IMAP
Mail Archiver can archive from both your email client and your IMAP accounts. Both have benefits and drawbacks. Here is what the MiniClass says about the topic:
Email client:
- The mails are already on your computer.
- You won't need to download all the data again.
- When archiving Mail Archiver needs to talk to your email client to get the mails out.
- This may make the mail client appear busy and slower than normal.
- There is no magic way to see if there are new mails.
Imap account:
- You will need to add the accounts one by one to Mail Archiver.
- You will need to download all mails again.
- Archiving again is much faster.
The easy way: delete emails
The easiest way to make archiving faster is to delete the emails in your email client or IMAP account.
If you can’t or don’t want to do that then here is an alternative solution.
Combine archiving from an email client with IMAP
Archive initially your emails from the mail client. Now switch to IMAP. When switching to IMAP you need to take care of a couple of details.
- Switch off archiving from the email client. Mail Archiver happily archives from both email clients and IMAP accounts at the same time. You can even delete Mail from the plan.
- You need to create the IMAP accounts with the same name as in your email client. Here is an account in Mail that starts with “Mac”.
- Create an IMAP account in Mail Archiver:The accounts need to have the same name or the emails will end up in a different location when you archive from IMAP.
- Add the new account to the plan:Select your mailboxes as usual:
- Now comes the trick to make archiving really fast. I mentioned that Mail Archiver can’t magically “see” the new emails when archiving from an email client. However, Mail Archiver can do that when you select a date range. You don’t want to select a new date range whenever you archive. So select a day range with a low number of days like here:
That’s it.
Of course, the technique is going to suck majorly if you have lots and lots of accounts.