If DEVONthink’s Preferences > Import are set to Destination: Select group, you will be presented with a HUD that allows choice of any group within any open database when a new item is added, e.g., a new email document resulting from choice of Message > Add to DEVONthink… for a selected message in Mail.
I’m not a developer, but my appreciation of DEVONtechnologies philosophy is that generally captures to databases should not change the native filetypes of captured items, when that’s possible. The Mail plugin of DEVONthink Pro Office provides options under Mail’s menubar to capture messages in their native filetype. I think there are advantages to that approach, as the messages can be opened under Mail for response or forwarding.
Currently, such capture of Mail messages doesn’t index the text content of attachments in messages. But Christian has noted in this forum that this is planned for the future.
Until recently, the default view of email messages has been Quick Look, which didn’t display images and attachments. They can be seen and accessed if the Text Alternative button is pressed. The current version of DEVONthink Pro Office provides a user choice in Preferences > Email to display messages in that Text Alternative view.
Other tools and options may also be available in DEVONthink. For example, I’ve got a tool that captures both the original email message and its attachments.
DEVONthink Pro Office and DEVONthink Pro are scriptable, and some potentially useful scripts are supplied. For example, there’s a script in the global scripts menu when Mail is frontmost, that adds capture options, including Add message(s) & attachments to DEVONthink. Select a Mail message that includes one or more attachments and choose this script. A new folder will be created, named as the Subject of the message and will include the email message and the attachments as separate items, all indexed and searchable. That’s the capture option I may choose for messages with important information in an attachment.
Sometimes I need to send a Windows-using colleague files that he isn’t set up to view on his computer. Suppose the capture of an attachment as describe in the paragraph above is for a Pages attachment. I can “print” the Pages document as PDF or export it as PDF from Pages, then send it to him.