By Glenn Fleishman

February 2, 2026 9:30 AM PT

Remove the RAW photo from a RAW+JPEG pair

Six Colors subscriber Mihir writes in with a Photos question:

How do I delete just the RAW file in a RAW+JPEG pair from my photos library on my iPad or my iPhone?

The short answer: you can’t. Not directly, anyway. And it’s not just an iOS or iPadOS limitation—macOS won’t let you do it either.

I can understand why Mihir asks. An image in RAW format can occupy several times the amount of storage as a JPEG equivalent. This has to do with the nature of the image being stored, as I explain below.

There are good reasons to capture as RAW and good reasons to discard those formats later. I’ll go through the background of RAW, and then provide a workaround to Apple’s missing piece.

Pre-post-processed camera sensor data

The RAW format used by digital cameras is often capitalized as RAW, but it’s not an acronym, nor is it a format in the traditional sense.

RAW means the file contains “raw,” or unprocessed, sensor data from your camera. To produce a JPEG, TIFF, or other format, a digital camera—including your iPhone—performs post-processing to produce an image that’s immediately usable. This can involve making significant changes to dynamic range and white balance, or even combining multiple images as a form of computational photography, as Apple does with iPhone photos.

This makes RAW the digital equivalent of a film negative: it’s typically larger than a post-processed file, and contains information that hasn’t yet been shaved down or squeezed into a presentable output. This gives you more flexibility when editing, but it requires processing to be usable for design, printing, or sharing.

Many cameras let you set a RAW export that includes a JPEG preview usable on its own. The JPEG is the best post-processed output from the RAW, and was originally provided because desktop (and later mobile) software didn’t support RAW or didn’t always keep up to date. Without the JPEG, importing the RAW file by itself would have been much less useful.

There’s no single RAW standard—Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others each have their own proprietary versions. It has become common to write “raw” in all caps, probably to distinguish it from the adjective form.

Because the information comes more or less directly from sensors without intermediate steps, it contains much more data that appears like noise, as the variation between adjacent sensors is retained rather than smoothed away. So even for RAW formats that compress data—not all do—the files will be larger than final images intended for viewing or printing. RAW will always be much larger than a corresponding JPEG file, as JPEG is lossy by nature, and discards some information even when you’re using the maximum setting.

After camera makers began supplying RAW output, often requiring apps they released to support it, photo-management and image-editing tools added RAW processing filters to meet the needs of digital photographers. Every professional app supports importing RAW, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixelmator Pro, Capture One, and DxO PhotoLab. And Photos!

Image-editing apps generally treat RAW as an import format: you view a preview, then apply changes before it is imported into an editing environment where you can work on the resulting image. Photo-management apps with built-in editing tools, like Photos and Lightroom, typically retain the original RAW image, and allow you to apply modifications on top. This provides much more flexibility in achieving your desired outcome.

One image unit, indivisible

When you import RAW+JPEG pairs into Photos, Apple treats them as a single, indivisible unit. You can choose which version to use as the basis for editing (Image: Use RAW as Original or Use JPEG as Original), but you cannot discard one half of the pair while keeping the other. Delete the image, and both files are thrown away.

Apple built Photos around a lossless workflow. This means that the original file that’s imported isn’t modified—changes are layered on top and previewed, and can be reverted back to the source image. You’d think it might engineer an override in a case like this, but apparently not.

If you need to reclaim the storage space those RAW files occupy, it’s only possible on a Mac, and it requires exporting, deleting, and re-importing.

Follow these steps if you haven’t made any modifications that you want to keep for any or all of your RAW+JPEG pairs:

1. Select the images you want to retain in JPEG format.
2. Choose File: Export: Export Unmodified Originals. In the export dialog, enable IPTC as XMP—this creates a sidecar file containing your metadata (titles, keywords, locations, descriptions, etc.). Without that, you’ll lose any metadata you added.
3. Choose a destination and click Export.
4. In the resulting folder, each RAW+JPEG file is represented by three files: the RAW file, the JPEG image, and an XMP sidecar.
5. Delete the RAW file or files from that folder.¹ (If you don’t, Photos treats the two as a pair and merges them when re-importing.)
6. Back in Photos, delete the original RAW+JPEG pairs. These are moved to the Recently Deleted album (see below).
7. Reimport the folder containing just the JPEG and XMP sidecar. Photos will apply metadata from the sidecar file automatically.
8. Delete the folder to free up space.

Of course, you can use the same process to jettison the JPEG and retain the RAW-formatted file.

When you delete files, if you’re sure that you have all the backups you need, you can click the Recently Deleted album in the Photos sidebar, authenticate if prompted, and click Delete All. (Or select images and click Delete X Items.) This removes the images from your Mac, iCloud Photos, and all linked devices immediately and forever. Use wisely!

Now, I noted above that this works for images that you haven’t modified in Photos. As part of its lossless workflow, exporting unmodified originals means you lose any changes unless you follow these steps:

1. Before step 5 above, return to each modified image in Photos.
2. The re-imported JPEG image should appear next to the RAW+JPEG file, because of the timestamp, which is preserved from the XMP data. Select the RAW+JPEG file, and press Command-Shift-C (Image: Copy Edits). This copies any modifications.
3. Now select the re-imported JPEG, and press Command-Shift-V (Image: Paste Edits).² This applies those changes.
4. Proceed to delete the original RAW+JPEG file.

Because of how iCloud Photos syncs images, you may want to delete all the images you intended to first, and make sure those images have moved to the Recently Deleted folder on your devices before you re-import them.

While Mihir specifically asked about iOS and iPadOS, the export-delete-reimport workflow requires the Finder and file management capabilities that only macOS provides.

For more expert advice on Photos, you should obtain a copy of Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos, which addresses all of the app’s features and vagaries.

A feature request, not a bug

People have been asking Apple to add a “split RAW+JPEG pair” or “delete RAW only” feature for many years, and the company hasn’t budged, likely because of its focus on lossless workflows.

In the meantime, if you find storing RAW+JPEG is taking you too close to a full volume, you could shoot RAW only on your camera, and let Photos generate a JPEG preview. If you want to convert to JPEG, you can export it from the RAW file and re-import it. Or you might switch between RAW+JPEG, RAW, and JPEG shooting profiles on your camera, as many support user-defined modes that include output formats.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]

By Jason Snell

January 29, 2026 8:08 PM PT

Apple’s record quarter: Is this what a hit iPhone looks like?

As was foretold (in last quarter’s corporate guidance), on Thursday Apple reported its biggest quarter ever. The holiday quarters are always Apple’s biggest, and this was no exception. It offered the most revenue ($143.8B) and most iPhone revenue ($85.3B) of any financial quarter in Apple’s history.

Suffice it to say that the iPhone 17 family is a hit.

“This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his conference call with analysts. As for the quarter itself? “It exceeded our expectations, to say the least.” Spoken like a man whose most popular product, the one vital to his company’s existence, grew 23% from the year-ago quarter.

Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook:

We exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point, it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time, we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.

Those details are really interesting. Back during the height of the pandemic, sales were constrained because Apple lacked access to “legacy nodes”—chips made on older processes for stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That is definitely not the case now, when it’s the “advanced nodes” of 3nm chips at TSMC that are just not being built fast enough because demand was much higher than Apple expected.

This also extends a long-standing story that the Chinese market really likes a new-looking iPhone. Overall, Apple’s revenue was up 38% in China. Cook said that traffic in Chinese Apple Stores grew by “strong double digits,” and cited surveys that said the iPad was the top-selling tablet in urban China and the MacBook Air and Mac mini were the top-selling laptop and desktop in the last quarter in urban China. Cook, a longtime proponent of Apple’s business in China, seems thrilled.

Department of the Tough Compare

Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.

Full credit to analyst Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs for the most creative way possible of trying to get Apple to reveal its future product strategies: Ng asked Apple CFO Kevan Parekh if there would be any tough comparisons due in the upcoming quarter, to which Parekh replied, “There’s nothing that rises to that kind of color that we’d outline in the outlook.”

Let me translate this for you: Ng is wondering if, perhaps, Apple is going to release some nice new Macs this quarter that will mean that it’s not a “tough compare” versus Q2 of 2025. Parekh replied by essentially pointing at his previous statement and saying that the dog did not, in fact, bark.

Look, we know there will be new MacBook Pros eventually, and probably pretty soon. Maybe they’ll help with Q2 Mac sales, though at this point they’d only be able to contribute for about half of the quarter. Still, a gold star to Ng for trying to logic his way into getting Parekh to reveal things about future product releases.

The storm clouds of financial headwinds… are called off

Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services. This was actually above the high end of Apple’s previous guidance on margin. This fact left several analysts on the call flabbergasted, none more so than Ben Reitzes of Mellius:

You know, I’m pretty shocked. I got to hand it to you, Tim, that you’re able to do 48% to 49%. What’s really going on there? How are you doing that with… the [memory] prices?

Parekh’s answer was basically that Apple tended to sell more of its high-margin products than its lower-margin ones during the quarter, which pushed margin up. What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.

Looking more broadly at Apple’s forecast, the company says the second quarter should offer 13% to 16% growth versus the year-ago quarter. Considering that the Q2 2025 revenue number was $95.4B, this means Apple expects to generate somewhere between $108B and $111B in revenue next quarter. That’s just a staggering number, because it suggests that even Apple’s boring quarters are going to routinely generate more than $100B in revenue. (For the record, last year’s fourth quarter was the first non-holiday quarter with more than $100B in Apple revenue. This would be the second. There may be no going back.)

Odds and ends

A few other notes about the numbers and call before I wrap it up:

• The iPad, bolstered by the A16 base iPad and the M5 iPad Pro, was up 6%.

• Wearables was down 2%, marking 10 straight quarters of year-over-year decline. (I suspect the softness in this category is why Apple is reportedly planning on launching several new home-based products, including a screen-based controller and a security camera.) However, here’s an interesting tidbit: Apple said it couldn’t make AirPods Pro 3 fast enough to meet demand, and that it believes the category would have grown had it not been for that supply constraint.

• Forget profits and revenues. “This quarter set an all-time record for operating cash flow, coming in at $53.9 billion,” Parekh reported. Accounting nerds, this is your stand up and cheer moment. The cash must flow!

• Everyone wants to know more about Apple’s AI deal with Google, but Apple’s not talking. “We aren’t going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google,” Parekh said. Cook emphasized that it should be thought of “as a collaboration,” rather than Google just riding in and saving Apple’s bacon. When Ben Reitzes of Mellius tried to get more out of Cook, only to be stonewalled, he replied: “Bummer. Okay, I tried,” he said. “You did,” the CEO replied through a squall of laughter.

By Jason Snell

January 29, 2026 2:18 PM PT

This is Tim: Complete transcript of Apple’s Q1 2026 financial call

Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe brag a little about setting an all-time record or two. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call for January 29, 2026.

Continue reading “This is Tim: Complete transcript of Apple’s Q1 2026 financial call”…

By Jason Snell

January 29, 2026 1:34 PM PT

Apple announces all-time record in revenue, iPhone sales

On Thursday Apple did what it forecast three months ago: announced an all-time record for a quarter in the company’s near 50-year history.

Company revenue was up 16% versus the year-ago quarter. iPhone and Services revenue also set all-time records. China growth was up 38% after four years of flat-to-down growth. iPad revenue was up 6% while Mac revenue was down 7% in a quiet quarter.

At 2pm Pacific/5pm Eastern, Apple will spend an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts. We’ll have our usual live transcript, followed at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern by our own live analysis on YouTube:

And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs:

Continue reading “Apple announces all-time record in revenue, iPhone sales”…

By Jason Snell

January 29, 2026 10:20 AM PT

Apple’s Creator Studio has a rough App Store roll-out

I gave some first impressions on Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle earlier this week, but one thing you don’t get to see when things are under embargo is how it all rolls out to the general public, which it did on Wednesday.

What strikes me most about it is how even Apple is stuck with the App Store and its limitations. Developers are quite familiar with how limited Apple’s back-end systems are and how they can inflict frustration on developers and customers alike. But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.

For example, yesterday the old versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote were updated, apparently with the only new feature being a dialog box that appears when you launch it that says “Use the New Version of Numbers,” with a button to Open New Version.

Why? Seems like Apple has chosen this moment to unify the iPad and Mac versions of Numbers and its fellow apps in a single entity in the App Store, and that leaves the old versions high and dry. The right thing to do here would be to gracefully migrate that Mac app and merge it with the other apps, but apparently not even Apple can convince itself to prioritize a feature that would make the launch of its new suite a little less clunky.

I’m also struck by the fact that Apple has had to do the App Store trick of attaching subtitles to the names of every app it makes, because the design of the App Store has led to stuffing keywords into titles becoming somehow a best practice. So it’s not Final Cut Pro anymore, it’s “Final Cut Pro: Create Video.” And Numbers is “Numbers: Make Spreadsheets.”

Also confusing: Double apps! Right now, I see two versions of Final Cut Pro in the Mac App Store. They’re actually the same app, but one is the original app that someone might have purchased in the past, and the other is a bundled edition that is tied to the iPad version and available by subscription. They have different icons, but otherwise seem to be identical, version 12.0.

I’ve complained a bunch about Apple converting its free iWork apps into freemium apps with paid upsells (to a bundle that’s a bad fit for many users), but that was before I saw that if you don’t subscribe to the bundle, the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote include ads attached to interface elements promoting the Creator Studio. The first-launch screen and two prominent menu items under the application menu push the Creator Studio. There’s also a prominent toolbar button for the suite-included Content Hub so that you can browse all that great premium clip media—but if you insert it, it’s watermarked, because you haven’t subscribed.

Finally, a word about the suite’s new app icons, which I specifically did not address in my review. It’s very easy and fun to complain about icons because art is entirely subjective. You can like what you like. I will say this: The early days of OS X icons were a reaction to the incredibly limited icon palette of classic Mac OS, so apps often offered incredibly detailed, photorealistic icons to represent themselves. It felt so modern. And many of those icons were beautiful.

But let’s forget about art for a moment and consider utility. Where do we interact with icons? For me, it’s the home screen on my iPad and iPhone, and the Dock and Spotlight launcher on my Mac. In every context, these icons are very small, far too small for a gorgeous skeuomorphic icon.

Clearly, the brief given to the designers of the new Creator Studio icon set was to make them all differentiated by color and shape. While I don’t love a lot of the choices they made—there are a lot of metaphors that seem to have drifted so far from reality that they make no sense anymore—I have to admit that they are all different silhouettes and colors, which means I know that the green bar chart that looks like it’s giving me the finger is Numbers when it’s in my Dock.

Should Apple aspire to better than utility, even when it comes to something as far away from mission-critical as app icons? Yes, it should. And I don’t think the people who are complaining about app icons are really complaining about app icons. They’re pointing out a symptom of a larger disease, which is Apple losing its way when it comes to usability and software design.

But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense to the user experience?

By Jason Snell

January 28, 2026 6:00 AM PT

Hands on with Apple Creator Studio: A bittersweet bundle

Apple’s Creator Studio has arrived, a new subscription bundle that includes some venerable Apple pro creative apps, a new acquisition, a content library, and a surprising integration with the company’s productivity apps. I’ve spent the last week or so noodling around with these apps, and here are my impressions.

Nice Pro App upgrades

Just to be clear, while I am a “professional creator,” I am also not the kind of person who spends all day making mission-critical edits in Final Cut Pro or music in Logic. (I do generate some podcasts in Final Cut Pro and Logic both, and have used them for years, but I’m definitely one of those people who uses a tenth of their features.)

Still, I’m a big fan of both apps. These are substantial apps that Apple continues to invest development resources in, and moving them to a subscription model makes me optimistic that they’ll continue to grow and evolve.

The debut of this bundle includes Final Cut Pro version 12, with a bunch of new features. Audio of footage is now transcribed and searchable, so you can find the location in a particular clip where someone says a particular phrase or even covers a specific topic. Similarly, video is indexed so that you can search for items and actions that appear in the video. If you’re managing lots of footage across a lot of clips, this will be a productivity boost. There’s also support for Beat Detection, which makes it easier to snap clips to the rhythm of any music track. (Final Cut Pro scans music and detects where the beats are.)

Specifically on the iPad version of Final Cut, Apple has added support for multiple selections (great for batch adjustments, which in the past I’ve had to do one at a time) and support for using an external monitor for preview. The app also supports iPadOS 26’s background API, so that you can leave Final Cut Pro while it’s exporting.

I freely admit that I am a person who professionally misuses Logic to edit podcasts rather than create music. (I have created the occasional song, as well, but they’re entirely limited to Robot or Not theme songs.) So I can’t really address the new features in Logic Pro 12 very well.

There’s a new Session Player, focused on synth keyboard and bass, and I have used these AI-driven “artificial musicians” in past projects, and they’re kind of magical. There’s a new Chord ID feature that uses AI to analyze audio and detect what chords are being played. The Mac app now has access to the same downloadable stock packages previously available only in the iPad version. And on the iPad, there’s support for a wild new feature that lets you swipe multiple takes together in order to build the perfect final track.

It also still edits podcasts.

A little more than a year ago, Apple bought Pixelmator. Clearly, that purchase was designed to add a photo-and-illustration editor to Apple’s creative professional offerings.

I am, alas, a person broken by Photoshop in the 1990s and not yet reformed. (I pay Adobe roughly the same for that privilege as you would for this entire bundle, by the way.) But even I, as a Photoshop Sicko, can appreciate how good Pixelmator Pro is—not just on the Mac, but now on the iPad for the very first time.

For its Apple debut, Pixelmator Pro 4 for Mac adds a new version of the Warp tool. But the real big news is that the whole thing is on the iPad for the first time, complete with Apple Pencil support and full document compatibility with the Mac version.

As Joe Rosensteel pointed out earlier this month, this suite is missing a photography component equivalent to Adobe’s Lightroom. Will that ultimately be Photomator Pro? A freemium update to Photos? Something else? There’s room for more stuff in this bundle, is what I’m saying.

Continue reading “Hands on with Apple Creator Studio: A bittersweet bundle”…

By Glenn Fleishman

January 26, 2026 9:15 AM PT

POP goes the email: migrate to IMAP

Some of us are old enough to remember using pine and other Unix screen-based email readers. Younger folks might have cut their teeth on Eudora and other Mac apps (back when we called them “software programs”) that could seamlessly log into a mail server, retrieve email locally, and let us interact with it. The first widely successful protocol of that type was Post Office Protocol (POP).¹

POP’s job was to download mail. If you left it on the server, it was just a giant mailbox. However, it was all we had, and we liked it!²

POP is now over 40 years old and has been effectively superseded by IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) for decades. The easiest comparison between the two is that POP is like a huge stack of printed messages, while IMAP is a desk organizer with labels in which paper has been sorted for easy retrieval.³

However, because many of us started with POP, we wound up just continuing to use it. (I only switched to IMAP in the late 2010s.) Six Color reader Neil writes is one of those people. He writes:

I have over 20 years of email, and several accounts, on my Mac, all housed in Apple’s Mail.app, categorized in several dozen folders (but my “All Inboxes” has grown to almost 10,000 emails – sigh).…it didn’t matter because I didn’t have a second email client reading the same emails.

However, because he now reads email on multiple devices, he’s found POP frustrating. He wants to migrate to IMAP, but his host doesn’t offer a migration path while retaining the same mailbox. He has to delete his old POP mailbox and create a new IMAP account. Of course, he doesn’t want to lose any of the email archive that he’s left stowed online in the POP account.

My hunch is that it is doable (maybe even straightforward), but I’m afraid to just try it for fear of losing some or all of my archives.

I can bring good tidings: there’s no technical issue with migrating your email from POP to IMAP, and you won’t lose anything if you take care. The less-good news: it requires some methodical work and a bit of patience.

Why POP stuck around so long

POP’s appeal was always its simplicity. Your email client downloaded messages from the server with an option to delete them afterward (or after a set period). Because of storage limits, you could typically keep a relatively small number of messages on the server, and regularly had to move everything else to local storage on your Mac. The server was mostly a temporary repository.

This worked well in a mostly single-device era, or when we had a desktop computer in one location and a laptop in the other. I developed a habit of using POP to read email on my laptop by having the email app on that computer download messages without deleting them. I would then download and delete the messages on my desktop computer and sort them into folders.⁴ That kept my mailbox from getting too huge, but I could read email away from my desktop.

Once you had multiple devices on which you wanted to read email, everything went out the window for POP. IMAP’s first version appeared not that long after POP’s initial release, but it took many more years for companies offering mail services to adopt IMAP. This was almost certainly because mail hosts had constrained storage space—as did we all—and pushed their users to download mail, something POP was well-suited for. As storage costs plummeted and people wanted more access to the same email in different locations, IMAP’s higher computational and storage needs made financial sense. (Or, with Google and Gmail, competitive sense.)

IMAP treats the server as the source of “truth.” Your mail client shows you what’s on the server, and actions you take—reading, deleting, filing into folders—sync back. Multiple devices see the same state. I have more gigabytes of storage than I need on most of my email hosts, so I can leave email there indefinitely. (Leaving your mail on solely on a server comes with huge risks! I’ll write about that sometime.)

The slight catch for longtime POP users is, of course, that all that mail you’ve accumulated over the years is likely just on your Mac, not on a server. You may need to do a few kinds of copying.

Download all those messages as a new archive

Having 10,000 messages on a server, whether POP or IMAP, personally makes me nervous. I’m not sure if Neil—or you, dear reader—has made a local copy of those emails, but his note indicates he’s filed some into folders, which indicates local storage.

The only way to ensure you have retrieved every message locally from a POP email server before deleting them is to perform a clean download. If you set up another account for the same mail host in Mail in your regular macOS account, I’m concerned about the conflicts that could result.

Instead, I suggested setting up a new macOS account, which can be temporary, for the most likely successful outcome. Here’s how:

1. Create a new macOS account, then log into it.
2. Launch Mail and follow prompts to duplicate your email account set up for POP in that account.
3. Set the download option to keep messages, not delete them, after retrieval.
4. Choose Mailbox: New Mailbox, and then choose On My Mac, and name the mailbox something identifiable, like downloaded POP email.
5. You can’t drag the Inbox folder to the On My Mac section, but you can click the POP Inbox folder, choose Edit: Select All, then drag the file selection on top of the new On My Mac folder you just created.

After the messages have downloaded, you can create an archive that you can import later if you need to:

1. Control/right-click the mailbox under On My Mac.
2. Choose Export Mailbox.
3. Select a location to save the mailbox that you can access from your main account.
4. Log out of this account and log back into your main macOS account. Mail exports it as a standard mbox file that can be imported into Mail or any modern email app.
5. In the Mail app, you can choose the exported mbox file into Mail by choosing File: Import Mailboxes, selecting “Files in mbox format,” clicking Continue, selecting the file, and completing the remaining steps.

After you’ve imported those messages, you can delete the new macOS account if you don’t think you’ll need it again. (I like to keep a secondary login for Mac tasks that work best outside my primary account.)

The migration strategy

In Neil’s case, there’s a split between locally stored email, which appears in the Mail app under the On My Mac section of the Mail sidebar, and email stored on a server, such as Apple’s iCloud or another mail host.

If you don’t see an On My Mac section, then you don’t have mail stored locally. If you haven’t followed the steps in the previous section, you should return to it and download all your messages via POP, then copy them locally.

As always, start with a backup. Make sure your Mac is backed up (always good advice), and then, in particular, that the Mail folder at ~/Library/Mail is completely up to date. If you’re using a different email app, make sure you know where it keeps its local mail store, and back that up.

Now you can proceed:

1. Delete all the messages from your POP mailbox on the mail host. It may be much faster to log into the host’s Webmail interface and delete the messages. Be sure you don’t delete your account, just the messages or POP mailbox.
2. At this stage, you may be required to delete the Mail account entry for the POP mailbox: select it in the Accounts sidebar, click the minus icon, and then confirm its removal.
3. Now you can use the mail host’s procedure for creating an IMAP account.
4. Once configured, go to Mail: Settings: Accounts, click the plus + icon at the lower-left corner, and follow the steps to add the IMAP account.⁵
5. With the account set up, you can use the Webmail interface or the Mail app to create folders on the server.
6. If you want to copy mail back to the server to have access to it while not at your Mac, you can go to the folder under On My Mac, select some or all of the contents, and drag those items to the appropriate folder in the new IMAP account’s section in the sidebar.

If you have gigabytes of email to resync to IMAP, it can take a long time, even with a fast connection, because IMAP servers aren’t particularly efficient. This might be a good overnight operation after you get it started and make sure it’s copying as expected. Double-check your storage limits on the server, too, so you don’t exceed the maximum space, which can interrupt an upload.

For further reading

Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Apple Mail explains setting up accounts across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, as well as plugins, automation, and solving common problems.

He’s also got a new title out, Take Control of MailMaven, which explains the ins and outs of migrating and using a sophisticated, newly released email app.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]