Do you store thousands and thousands of email messages? Do you infrequently access many of these messages? If so, you could archive these email messages using EagleFiler. Once the messages have been archived you can delete them from Mail. Depending upon how many total messages you store in Mail, this might improve Mail’s performance.

[Update: If you don’t need to be able to readily search and view your exported messages then you might prefer to use Apple Mail’s built-in Export command. You can export an entire mailbox of messages. The export is stored as an mbox file on your Mac’s hard drive. This mbox file can be subsequently imported if you do need to look through the messages. MacObserver has a article that provides step-by-step instructions for archiving your mail using Mail’s Export command. ]

[Update Jan 2023: I originally wrote this article a decade ago in 2012. I continue to use and recommend EagleFiler. It’s a great way to archive email messages from Apple Mail. I’ve updated this article a couple of times over the past decade. EagleFiler’s price increased, for example.]

Because email is so central to my business, I like to hold onto just about every message I send or receive. This means I have mail messages that I sent between the late 1990s and the present. Rather than storing years of these email messages in Mail, I archive them and store them in EagleFiler. In EagleFiler I can view the individual email messages including all of the header (to, from, date and subject) information and the message itself. I can also search for words contained in the messages. EagleFiler stores both the email message and the attachment. You can open the attachments by simply double-clicking them in EagleFiler. This triggers Mail to display the email message and the attachment.

You can download a trial version of EagleFiler if you’d like to test it. If you continue to use the program after the trial period has expired you’ll need to buy it for $50. Archiving messages into EagleFiler couldn’t be easier. Select one or more email messages in Mail and then press EagleFiler’s Capture Key, which is F1 by default. That’s it. Just sit back and wait for the messages to be copied into EagleFiler which happens pretty quickly. Once you’ve confirmed that the messages are in EagleFiler then you can delete them from Mail.

EagleFiler can actually do a lot more than store your email messages. You could think of it as a digital filing cabinet. EagleFiler can import too many file types to list here, but it includes web pages, PDF files, Word files and jpeg images. You can read the entire list. EagleFiler has a very user-friendly interface and many more features listed here. There are other mail archiving products on the market. Adam Engst of Tidbits wrote brief descriptions of  some of the better known mail archiving products, Mail Steward, Mail Archiver and DevonThink Pro Office. Since I already was using EagleFiler to store, tag and organize other documents, it made sense for me to start to use it to archive my infrequently used mail messages also. I hope you check out EagleFiler.