Archiving Emails to Local Folder in Outlook for Mac

Overview

This article will step you through configuring Outlook for Mac (IMAP Account) to view emails when Offline (No Internet Connection) and/or to archive old emails.

This can be useful when needing to reduce Mailbox storage of your hosted email account, as this will move emails from your Mailbox Inbox and IMAP Folders on the Server to locally on your Mac.

Please note at this point of time November 2022, Outlook for Mac 2019 and later do not have the ability to show On My Computer Folders, for this reason unable to archive emails from the Mailbox to Local folders on your Mac.

Instructions

1. Open Outlook App.
2. You should see the heading On My Computer in the left column.
   
   
   Otherwise follow the below process.

3. Next create a Local Folder under On My Computer.
   Right click on the heading On My Computer then New Folder.
   
   
   Next Right click on the new folder “Untitled”, then rename folder to something useful to identify e.g. Local Archive.
   
   
4. To move a single or multiple emails right click on emails to select (will then be highlighted Blue), then Move, then select local folder e.g. Local Archive (On My Computer).
   
5. Under On My Computer, click on Local Archive folder and you should now see the email/s you have moved from the Mailbox Inbox to locally on your Mac.
   

You can create subfolders under the Local Archive folder to organise emails further to replicate Mailbox IMAP Folders.

If you drag/drop email’s from the Mailbox Inbox to Local Archive folder,
you are only copying the email not moving i.e Diskspace in the Mailbox will not decrease.\

Archived emails are stored locally – this means that if your Mac computer or hard drive fails, the archived emails will also be lost in the process.

Conetix recommends using the Mac inbuilt backup option Time Machine to backup to external device.