I have an urgent case where I have to recover AOL emails from 3 Mac hard drives. At this point I have no further information on the project, but I was wondering if anyone out there has recovered AOL emails from OS X before, and if so can you offer any advice?
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Are the emails obtained via the mail client for the mac ?
If so then pull the mail from the users library and import the folder into a newly created mac account with no internet access. Certain types of emails might get a date change to the import date. But the email itself will retain the sent and receive dates.
Highlight the mail in each folder you imported and you can mass print them all to PDF. The only thing there is just label the output according to the folder it comes from. So inbox should be labeled inbox when printed. Each email printed will then be appended by a number. So you will see inbox 1 through inbox X. You will not be able to print each email this way and retain its name. But it is very automated way of mass printing emails for review by someone else. If it is several years of emails then don't try to do them all as it will choke up. You will need to do it in batches. Also you can highlight the same emails and export the attachments to another folder relating both to each other.. EG inbox I and inbox attachment I.
You can also review them in the mac with the preview and space bar option.
When you bring the email in this way you will need to rebuild the email. The rebuild option is under the mailbox option listed in the mac mail client.
Your basically copying over the old mail folder with the new mail folder this is why you need to rebuild the mail so it will populate. Otherwise if you copy the folders you can import them into a new account.
Thanks guys…… all sorted. Thank you for your advice!