---
title: "Take your mail with you"
description: "One download from the Export page with everything in it: every message and attachment as mbox files another mail app opens, plus your contacts, calendar, labels, rules, templates, notes and settings."
url: "https://nextmail.sh/docs/knowledge/trust/export"
area: "Knowledge base"
category: "Privacy & ownership"
status: "live"
---

# Take your mail with you

One download from the Export page with everything in it: every message and attachment as mbox files another mail app opens, plus your contacts, calendar, labels, rules, templates, notes and settings.

## Details

- One button, on the Export tab of your workspace settings. It sits beside the Exports heading, and the confirmation dialog it opens lists what the archive holds with a count beside each part. Export now then prepares a single zip in the background, named after the workspace and the moment it was made, such as acme_20260922_091402.zip, so you can leave the tab while it is built and come back to a progress bar. Starting an export and downloading one both ask for your two-factor code, or for a code sent by email when two-factor is off, and once you have confirmed you are not asked again for an hour. A workspace can make one export a day, and one that fails does not count. Every export the workspace has made is listed on the tab, newest first and a page at a time, and each can be downloaded for one year, after which its file is deleted and the row says so. Only the workspace owner, and members whose role holds every permission, can export, because the archive holds the whole workspace.
- Mail comes out as mbox, the format mail apps have read for decades: one file per folder that holds mail (inbox, sent, archive, drafts, spam and trash), every message exactly once, with its text, its HTML and its attachments inside it. Apple Mail opens them through File → Import Mailboxes, and Thunderbird through the ImportExportTools NG add-on. The labels a message carried travel with it in a header of its own.
- Every message is a rebuild, and says so. A message is parsed once and the original bytes are never retained, so the archive carries the text, the HTML, the attachments, the addresses, the dates and the three headers a conversation is threaded on (Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References), and it cannot carry the DKIM signature or the exact part boundaries. Each message is marked as rebuilt in its own headers and the README at the top of the zip says the same, because a file claiming to be the message as it arrived would be a file nobody could verify as one.
- The rest of the workspace comes with it. Contacts as a vCard file any address book imports, audiences with their members, calendar events and their attendees as an .ics file any calendar opens, and labels, rules, thread notes, signatures, settings and every template with each of its published versions as JSON. The public half of each address’s key is there too, as an armored .asc file.
- An end-to-end encrypted message comes out the way it went in. The plaintext exists in the browser that opened it and nowhere else, so the archive carries the ciphertext exactly as stored, marks the message as sealed and names it in the manifest, and nothing is decrypted on the way out. Opening those needs your private key, which is never in the archive: back it up from the Encryption tab of your address on the Addresses page.
- Nothing is left out quietly. A file you deleted leaves a marker rather than vanishing, so the manifest lists it by name and the date it was deleted instead of promising bytes that are gone. Anything that could not be read (a missing body, an attachment that would not decode) is listed there too, with the reason, rather than dropped.
- What never goes in: passwords, sessions, API keys, OAuth tokens, DKIM private keys, webhook secrets, your private encryption key, assistant chat history, and tracking and analytics logs. The archive is a download you start from the Export page and nothing else: it is not part of the REST API or the SDK, and nothing produces one on a schedule.