Geert JM Vanderkelen

This is more a follow-up on my previous post about auto-mounting (encrypted) disk images in MacOSX.

I hear that some folks have problems with the Search functionality inside Mail.app. I’m doing it a bit differently: not moving everything from Mail.app to the encrypted disk image. So here is how I do it. Make sure you backup your email, especially if you are still using POP3 (you really should use IMAP if you can):

* Close Mail.app and make sure your encrypted disk image is mounted.
* Created a Mail subdirectory in the disk image.
* Go to ~/Library/Mail/ and copy your mail accounts directories to the Mail subdirectory on the disk image. They are called like IMAP-@server. Note: copy, don’t move for now, but remove them later when everything is working.

Now a bit more difficult, I haven’t found out how to do this within Mail.app (well I know where it is, but it’s not editable):
* Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist: double click it in Finder, it will open in Property List Editor.
* Open Root and go MailAccounts. The accounts are numbered, so you have to look a bit.
* Check for each account the AccountPath and change it to the new location on your encrypted disk image.
* Save it.
* Open Mail.app, and it should work!

Don’t forget to remove the mail subdirectories in ~/Library/Mail once all is working. Don’t delete the once you haven’t copied of course, and make sure you have made backups before doing anything.

Auto-mounting the secured disk image is discussed in a previous post.