Archiving By Date in Mail.app

I’m as much of an Apple fanboy as anyone; however I was pretty upset to learn I couldn’t easily search my Mail.app emails by date. I wanted to backup and delete all messsages pre-January 1st, 2006. In Outlook, I would have been able to enter a date range to search, displayed all my results and then delete the messages. Not so in Apple Mail.

I have almost 5 GBs of saved email and enough is enough. I recently purchased MailSteward to help me backup all my emails. The MailSteward software worked great, yet I still needed to delete the old messages in Mail.app. There is no filter, rule or tagging method which worked well but I finally found the answer.

I did a search on all mail sent to me. Given the fact that no message will be in my inbox unless it came to my email address, I figured this would work. Once Mail returned the results, I sorted by date and deleted over 3 GB of old emails.

I still wish I could search by date though.