Advice needed: constructing a selective email database

DEVONthink Tips
1

[If this is in the wrong section can a mod please relocate as appropriate?]

I first purchased Devonthink in 2006 but despite the long association I have never really managed to get to grips with it. Now I want to create a database and need some advice.

Essentially, I want to create a database of all correspondence with a given party over many years. Those emails and all their attachments are spread over a number of Gmail a/cs. Is this possible in Devonthink? I want to automate as much as possible the retrieval of the data rather than looking it up in a browser and dragging to Devonthink. It would be good to OCR any PDFs but that’s beyond the capabilities of my Pro version and as yet the cost benefit of upgrading is unclear - as I mentioned I’ve never got to grips with using the application in the past. I do have external OCR apps but I can’t see how to integrate those into a workflow for Devonthink.

Suggestions as to how to go about this would be gratefully received, I’ve perused the Vimeo tutorials but that hasn’t really produced any insights. Or is Devonthink not an appropriate tool for this?

TIA

2

DEVONthink Pro’s support for emails and archiving them is very limited, see scripts in the scripts menu extra while Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook/Entourage is active. But only DEVONthink Pro Office is able to index them, to convert them to rich text, to use an alternate view providing access to attachments or to easily archive lots of messages or complete mailboxes. DEVONthink Pro Office includes also a plugin for Apple Mail to speed up archiving lots of emails. However, neither DEVONthink Pro nor DEVONthink Pro Office support Gmail directly, it’s only possible to archive emails from an email client like Apple Mail.

3

Thanks will look at the scripts, seems like another project where DT is a mismatch sadly.

4

gmail is Web-based.

It is, however, possible to ‘capture’ gmail as a Mail account, making it possible to archive them using the Mail plugin of DEVONthink Pro Office.