Whereas some mailboxes in Apple Mail can have 'behaviors' associated with them, this is not true for an Archive mailbox.(Because, I presume, Archives are synced via IMAP like other mailboxes, and items therein are not compressed or anything.) There's not a performance benefit or storage savings to storing items in an Archive.It will not move it off the server to a local location, i.e., to On My Mac. When an item is moved to an Archive mailbox, the message will remain on the server where the message originated.

In Apple Mail, an Archive mailbox just a regular mailbox, similar to the Inbox, Sent, and Drafts mailboxes.Can you verify that I'm correct? Or could you expand upon this knowledge, or correct any misunderstandings? So, below is a description of my understanding of how Archive mailboxes work in Apple Mail. You may wish to set the folder to Auto-Purge, so that old mail is automatically deleted from this folder.' Mail placed in this folder is automatically marked as read. 'This (system) folder has no additional functionality other than a handy storage place for mail you no longer consider to be current.'If you want to clean up your inbox without deleting your emails, you can archive or mute them.'.Other mail apps/services also have Archive mailboxes, which makes me think that they are fairly standard now. The messages remain there until you delete or move them.'įind them later? Well, heck, I can find messages later in my Inbox or anywhere else I decide to store them, right? Does an Archive provide an improvement in that regard? Mail creates an archive mailbox in the Mail sidebar for each account whose messages you’re archiving, and moves the messages you selected there. 'You can store messages in an Archive mailbox so you can quickly find them later when you’re ready to take action.

Here's all that I can find in the documentation: Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time finding detailed documentation about it. I'd like to better understand what this feature does, how it works, and why someone would want to use it.

Archive mac mail sierra