Sort your Gmail backups into folders in Mail.app

Graeme Mathieson has a good tip to enhance my post on how to backup Google Gmail. I do this because I would hate to lose some of my email if GMail were to ever lose a server or something. (Hey, ya never know!)

Graeme shows how to sort your Gmail into it’s proper folders in Mail.app, for example, something that I completely overlooked.

Set your conditions as follows:

The first is if the ‘From’ address contains your own GMail email address (foobar@gmail.com, for example). This covers all the messages you send directly from your official GMail address. The second is to match the ‘Sender’ header. You won’t find it listed in the drop-down by default. Select the bottom entry — Edit Header List…, click the + to add a new entry and enter Sender as the value. I don’t know for sure, but it’s probably case sensitive, so best to make that a capital ‘S’. Now click ‘OK’ and select the drop-down again and ‘Sender’ should appear. You want to see if that’s equal to your GMail email address. That will cover sending from any other address you have set up in the accounts tab of your GMail. The actions to perform are to move the message to your ‘Sent’ folder, mark it as read (you read it while you were writing it, right? ) and stop evaluating any more rules. Click OK to save the rule. It will ask if you want to apply the rule to currently open mailboxes. Click ‘yes’ to have it process the messages already in your inbox, and you should notice all the mail you sent magically disappear.

Thanks, Graeme!!