Add gmail messages directly to DevonThink 3?

How can I directly add my gmail messages to DevonThink 3?
I only see suggestions to map gmail to AppleMail??? This is ridiculous.
This is a deal-breaker
Please tell me that there is a direct way to add gmail to Devonthink!

You can use Apple Mail as you note to retrieve your Gmail, then you can add those messages directly to DT3 by script or by drag/drop.

Or you can use Zapier to save your Gmail messages in a Dropbox folder and then index that folder in DT3.

Gmail in a browser is not an email client, so no there is no connection with our desktop application.

As @rkaplan noted, adding the Gmail account to Apple Mail is the most robust method of handing importing emails into DEVONthink.

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There is a reasonably straight-forward way to add GMail to DEVONthink.

In GMail, there is a ā€œmoreā€ drop-down menu that is designated as three dots set vertically.

click the ā€˜moreā€™ menu, to see the functions that can be applied to the displayed message
select ā€˜Download messageā€™. This will save the gmail message in the unix .eml format

At this point there are a number of approaches

  1. manually move the .eml file into a DT group
  2. use the Folder Actions Setup service on a special folder that invokes a script which imports any file dropped in the folder into DEVONthink
  3. set the default application used to open .eml files as DEVONThink, which will then ask you into which database and group you wish to add the email file.

I personally like the third option, since I do not use Appleā€™s mail.app.
However, if that is a problem for you, use solution 2.
You can use a DEVONthink import script which drops all new ā€˜emailā€™ files into a specific database inbox, or you can have it ask to which database and which group youā€™d like to save it.

The .eml file works reasonably well in DT2 and DT3. It is not editable, and I have found very few formats / content combinations that it cannot handle.

  • RHM
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In GMail, there is a ā€œmoreā€ drop-down menu that is designated as three dots set vertically.

click the ā€˜moreā€™ menu, to see the functions that can be applied to the displayed message
select ā€˜Download messageā€™. This will save the gmail message in the unix .eml format

Iā€™m not seeing this option. Do you have a screencap?

Apologies for the long delay in responding.

Enclosed are two screenscrapes.

[1] When viewing an email on the web, (or in an app like Mailplane), you will see in the heading, on the right side, three dots in a vertical arrangement.

[2] Clicking the icon, will open a drop-down menu.
Selecting ā€˜Download messageā€™ will save the email being viewed as an .eml file

I use a file on my desktop into which I drop the .eml file, and have Folder Actions set up to import the file to a group (which I select with the DEVON 3 clipper) and then delete the file.

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No worries! Thanks for the info.

Just wanted to add, for the sake of future users, that the latest Mailplane.app release includes support for clipping emails to Devonthink under the File ā†’ Save Clip menu option. Itā€™s nice!

Screenshot 2021-02-19 at 12.24.06

Does it produce an .eml file?
Are the attachments imported separately in the same group?

Yes, the kind of item created is ā€œEmail Messageā€. Attachments (tried images and also other binary attachments like zips and pdfs) appear as embedded in the message, not as separate items.

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Thanks for the clarification. :slight_smile:

Hello,

Your posts are very interesting.

  • I could not find a keyboard shortcut to download the emails. Have you found one ?
  • what are folder actions ? part of which app ?

thank you very much !

Folder actions are a special type of AppleScript.
They are attached to (or detached from) a folder in the Finder via Control-click > Services > Folder Actions Setup.

DEVONthink comes with a few built-in folder actions, accessible in the folder actions setup.

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now I understand. thanks very much and have a nice weekend.

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You too! :slight_smile:

Gmailā€™s web UI as well as apps like MailPlane (which use the web UI) allow you to save an email as a .eml file by using the drop down menu located in the upper right corner of the message for which you want the email file.

  • Rich

yes, thank you. I was just trying to avoid the clicking and make it automatic somehow.

Thank you for this. I also chose option 3 though for some reason opening the .eml with DT3 doesnā€™t work as well. I needed to do import file.

This answer is exactly what i was looking for