I have always struggled to properly export email from Airmail to DevonThink for archival purposes because it usually exports as plaintext with the default settings, which frankly is not very useful in a world where every email has complex HTML in it these days.
I remember reading in the forums that Apple Mail is the gold standard for export but unfortunately it is not powerful enough for my workflow, so I had to find another solution that revolved around Airmail.
Airmail recently added Custom Actions and by chance, I found out that if you use the following settings you can export to your DevonThink inbox folder as a perfectly formatted EML file.
Maybe the solution I posted yesterday could help there. I’m also pulling out email files, including attachments, just using an IMAP server. They are not called .eml, but they are just the same - I actually do rename them, as part of the process, into .eml and then push them over to DT’s global inbox. DT is happy with that and shows them perfectly. The only thing I had to do is to figure out useful filenames - for that I am parsing each email down to it’s Subject: header, and convert that into a filename.
Oh wow, that’s a serious solution haha! I think mine works well enough for me but thanks for sharing!
I just wish it worked cross platform but not enough to do anything more complicated
Well it’s actually not all that complicated. I just did a very lengthy documentation for it, but it is as simple as installing Docker, then extracting that github repository from me, and starting it all up. I was so annoyed yesterday morning as I managed, with the normal process, to at the end not delete from the folder from which I was transferring over to DT, but from my actual inbox, like everything. So I thought, well I need a more reliable process that will work before I’m having my first cup of coffee.
Now, if I want to transfer data from my mail client into DT, I literally just hit Cmd+A to select all, Ctrl+A like archive (I’ve used BetterTouchTool to hook up the email rule in Outlook that will push all selected mails over into a folder, and that folder is from my local IMAP server that I’m running inside the docker container.) Then on DT, I just hit the new button I’ve added to the toolbar. It’ll pick up the mails from the IMAP server, move them into the global Inbox from DT, from there move them on into the folders where I want them to be by means of a set of smart rules within DT - and it removes them from the IMAP server.
So really just Select all, Ctrl+A in Outlook, then one click of a button inside DT. That’s it. Thinking about it, could very likely also bind it all together using BetterTouchTool, so that when hitting Ctrl+A it also immediately triggers the import within DT.
I was already archiving into DT before, but that lengthy process basically let me have mails all over the place. Now it’s very immediate.
I am currently researching my options for connecting DT to Airmail which I am currently investigating on my endless journey to find the perfect email-client )
Unfortunately the custom action from the OP does not work for me. The body of the exported message is empty in DT. I’ve read about the legacy mode enabling for Airmail 4 but can’t find the setting any more in my version of Airmail (5.6.12).
Airmail is not a good choice if you’re looking for inter-application communication. Spark is a worse choice. Apple Mail is still the clear winner in this regard.
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