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Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod

ipodmailEver need to take your email with you from one computer to another? Can’t or don’t want to use IMAP? Like the idea of using your iPod or memory stick to store your Apple Mail messages?

Jeffrey Glover, who among other things runs iChatters, emailed to ask if I knew how to get the Apple Mail folder onto an iPod. I suggested IMAP instead, but that doesn’t suit everyone as he explained,

I know I have the options of IMAP or even .Mac to keep my email central, but being involved in several different enterprises I’ve got 8 different pop accounts to keep track of and my Mail folder is 3 Gigs in size… Accessing all that data over the internet, just isn’t an option for me.

Fair enough. I said I didn’t know how to do it, but I had read Andrew Pontious’ step-by-step account of how to move the Mail folder onto another volume, and thought it might work although I didn’t have an iPod to test it on.

He emailed back to say that it did work. And this is how he did it (after the jump):

  1. I copied “~/Library/Mail” & “~/Library/Mail Downloads” from my Library folder to my iPod.

  2. Renamed them to “Mail_old” and “Mail Downloads_old” in my Library folder (Or I simply could have moved them for safe keeping somewhere else.)

  3. Used Terminal to create two symbolic links in my Library Folder to my iPod:
    cd ~/Library
    ln -s /Volumes/MyiPodName/Mail Mail
    ln -s “/Volumes/MyiPodName/Mail Downloads” “Mail Downloads”

  4. Logged out and back in, and Voila, it worked!

You will need to create these symbolic links on every computer you will use to access your email.

He adds, “Of course, you can’t eject the iPod while you’ve got Mail open, and it’s a good idea to back it up every now and then to your hard drive due to iPod’s bad track record with data.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 21st September, 2005 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod”

  1. Dan Warne says:
    September 24th, 2005 at 6:42 am

    Now, if only the entire mail folder could be easily copied to the iPod and then READ on the iPod. (But to be useful you’d need to be able to view attachments and so on which is a little beyond the purview of the average iPod…)

  2. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Cross-platform, portable Firefox! says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 9:52 pm

    [...] I wouldn’t mention this at all on a blog about Apple Mail, except that it got me thinking. How good would it be if someone could develop a portable version of Apple Mail, one that would at least run “plug-n-play” on any Mac? I imagine that it would more complicated than simply storing your Apple Mail folders on an iPod, but it must be possible. If only! [...]

  3. Ryan says:
    October 7th, 2005 at 1:22 am

    This could be automated a bit more – and made more plug-n-play – with a shell script or applescript to automate the generation of the symbolic links.

    A more sophisticated version could use a pair of scripts to allow this set-up to be used temporarily on another user’s account.

    A log-in-my-mail script could quit mail, rename the user’s mail folders and mail preferences, create the symbolic links, copy your preferences over from the ipod (or link them), and finally launch mail.

    A log-out-my-mail script would undo the above actions, thus restoring the original user’s mail setup.

    The scripts would of course be stored on the ipod along with the mail files.

  4. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Two Top Fives: Hawk Wings 2006 in review says:
    December 31st, 2005 at 2:58 am

    [...] Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod. [...]

  5. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Thunderbird: Portable, Intel Macs says:
    January 18th, 2006 at 2:39 pm

    [...] You can put your Mail folder on an iPod or memory stick and use Apple Mail on whatever Mac you have to hand, but that’s nowhere near as elegant a solution. Technorati Tags: portable, memory stick, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Intel Mac, Firefox, Camino, Mail.app, iPod [...]

  6. Aaron says:
    March 26th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    Hi.
    I read your blog from 2005 “Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod”. I have a Lacie external drive and would like to store my e-mail on the external drive and access it from two different Macs both running Tiger. Does the methods mentioned in the blog above work only with POP accounts or does it work with IMAP as well?
    Thanks
    Aaron

  7. Tim Gaden says:
    March 26th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

    It works fine for IMAP, which Mail caches locally (rather like POP mail) anyway.

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