I’m trying to import some local folders in Apple Mail into eM Client on the Mac. Ultimately, I want to export them in EML format for use in eM Client on a PC.
They’re in four different mailboxes, from previous work accounts. Three of these have a flat structure, i.e. the emails for those mailboxes are in single folders. The last one has a nested folder structure.
The import process goes fine, and all sub-folders and emails are present. The issue is that for the account with the nested folders (which was originally an Exchange / Office 365 account), the attachments are all empty (0KB).
I originally tried doing this last summer. From my notes, this was apparently a known issue with the import wizard since an update to Apple Mail. eM Client hoped to have a fix out in v10.1 (I assume this was from a reply on this forum, but unfortunately can’t find it).
Trying again at the beginning of 2026, I’m having exactly the same issue. Could anyone offer any suggestions? Or if this still hasn’t been fixed, let me know so I don’t waste time troubleshooting. Many thanks.
I’m trying to import some local folders in Apple Mail into eM Client on the Mac. Ultimately, I want to export them in EML format for use in eM Client on a PC
The import process goes fine, and all sub-folders and emails are present. The issue is that for the account with the nested folders (which was originally an Exchange / Office 365 account), the attachments are all empty (0KB)
Try first exporting your local folder Apple mail emails to a eg: Folder on your Mac desktop in .eml and “make sure they manually open ok”.
Then copy those .eml message files to your PC in a folder on your desktop, and again open the .eml message files to make sure they all open ok and are not corrupted from copying them across.
If they don’t open on your desktop after copying to your PC , re-export them again from Apple mail till they all open ok on your PC desktop.
Then just try “dragging them” directing into whatever eM Client account folder you want.
If they still show 0kb after dragging them into your eM Client account and won’t open, then it could be “your eM Client version might be outdated” or possibly needs a reinstall".
So next I would suggest to try uninstalling eM Client and go to the release history page and download the same or later version and reinstall and see if that then fixes the problem.
Note: If you do update to a later version make a manual backup first via “Menu / Backup” incase you need to restore for any reason.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, Apple Mail doesn’t have the ability to export in EML format, so that approach is a non-starter.
Your reply got me to check out the current Apple Mail’s export options, however, and found its mailbox exporter now exports more cleanly, with one .mbox file per sub-folder. I tested exporting one of the folders this way, then importing into eM Client using the .mbox file importer (rather than the Apple Mail importer). The result was the same as before, however - the message imports, but attachments (generally) don’t.
Note there are no export options in Apple Mail, besides choosing where you want the folder exported to, and whether to include sub-folders in the export.
I haven’t tried uninstalling eM Client and installing fresh. I did, however, update to the latest version (10.something) and found it made no difference. This was the first thing I tried yesterday, as eM Client had said the situation would be fixed in v10.1.
Edit: on further investigation, you can export messages individually as EML from Apple Mail - by dragging them to the desktop. I’ll consider this approach, but am currently checking out options for conversion software that converts an entire mailbox, including sub-folders, directly.
Just to close the loop, I never got the attachments to transfer properly.
In the course of investigating, however, I realised the three mailboxes that seemed 100% had issues with duplicate emails. I managed to fix these by exporting from Mail by dragging the emails to a folder on the desktop (thousands at a time was no problem, and virtually instant), then de-duping with Gemini 2. Or just using the Deduplicator tool in eM Client itself. It depended on the mailbox which was more effective / necessary.
Returning to the original issue, I tried the demo versions of a couple of commercial email exporter apps that support Apple Mail - Emailchemy and one from Cubexsoft (both on Mac). They both seemed to export emails OK, but many mails were in the wrong folders. Tried 4n6 too (on the PC). It couldn’t export mails from my original Apple Mail mailbox export, from an older version that used lots of sub-folders. It could export from mailboxes exported from the current version Apple Mail, which uses single (non-standard…) mboxes per folder, but there were lots of missing emails.
Anyway, the best solution in terms of the original issue was where I’d started - using the Import wizard in eM Client. Attachments are mostly empty, but at least all the emails are there, with no duplicates. Given I’ll likely never need to refer to them anyway, I won’t waste any more time. The originals are on my Mac laptop anyway.