After several recent columns on the vagaries of managing Time Machine backups, including how to prune snapshots and ensure you don’t delete files from the backups you want to keep, Macworld reader Janet wrote in asking about how Time Machine interacts with email.
She wondered how Time Machine creates a backup of email messages, given that Mail stores these messages in what appears to be a file or database format. And what happens if you delete an email message months ago and want to retrieve it?
Looks can be deceiving: while mailboxes look monolithic, Apple stores each message and attachment discretely, which is in part to allow Spotlight indexing and per-message backups. You can see how messages are organized in ~/Library/Mail/V5/ and expanding down into any folder that has a name with a combination of letters, numbers, and hyphens.
