I need some help with exporting emails from my iPhone and iPad. I manage my own domain email and had several mailboxes set up since 2016. Recently, I switched hosting providers and mistakenly updated the mailbox username and password to the new host before I migrated everything. Now, my accounts are synced to the new, empty mailboxes, and I've lost all my client-side email history (emails from 2016 to last August) because the original mail server doesn't have any backups. Luckily, all my historical emails are still on my iPhone and iPad since those devices haven't been updated yet. I'm looking for a way to export or transfer these emails into either Outlook (on Windows or Mac) or Apple Mail on a MacBook. I would love to archive them in formats like PST or MBOX, or even as individual files if necessary. I want to make sure I can save these locally stored messages before I change the mail account settings and potentially lose access to them. Any detailed steps or recommended tools would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
I’ve had a similar situation, and the best solution was to use an email client on my Mac that supported importing directly from my iPhone using a cable connection. You can try apps like iMazing or others that help with exporting your emails without needing to sync to the new server. This way, you can keep everything safe before making any updates.
If all your emails are on your iPhone, a simple way might be to forward them to another email address you still have access to. But since you mentioned there are tons of emails going back to 2016, that could be quite tedious! Considering the volume, there might be other ways to handle it. You could look into exporting them as attachments; some apps let you do that and then you can import them back into Mail or Outlook.
Yeah, forwarding that many emails sounds like a nightmare! I'd suggest looking into third-party apps that specialize in email exporting. They'll allow you to extract everything in bulk, which might save you a lot of time and hassle.
iMazing is a solid choice! It can pull the emails directly off your device, and you can choose the format you want to export them in. Just be sure to double-check how the emails will be formatted in your new client afterward.