Archive Mail: inconsistencies?

I just started to archive mail into DT3 from Apple Mail’s “On my Mac” mailbox hierarchy. I use the import panel in the left sidebar, DT Mail Plug-in is installed and activated. DT scans the mailbox structure and under “emails” displays the mailbox hierarchy, indicating on the right how many mails are in each box. The problem is that while for most mailboxes, those numbers are correct, for quite a few there are wild variations. Sometimes less than 1/2 are listed. When I actually perform the archive action and the mails show up in DT, indeed, only a fraction of the mails arrive. In the log window, there is no mention of “X mails have already been imported”, which I see when this is actually the case. When I use the refresh command on the import, sometimes the number changes to the correct one, and sometimes not. Quite arbitrary it seems.

I see no reports of such behaviour here. One possibility could be my large mailbox. I have around 130,000 emails (around 35 GB). Is that amount choking my 8 GB MacBook (which otherwise handles everything I throw at it)?

It is recommended to import large mail installation in chunks. Fair enough, but this issue seems to be arising at a level where this does not matter. I cannot prevent the import function from scanning my whole mailbox structure. Only later I can choose to only archive certain sub-mailboxes, but by that time the damage already seems to be done.

When I used the “Mailbox > Add to DT3” command in Mail to import a specific mailbox, there seems to be no problem, even for the mailboxes that report a vastly wrong number of emails in the import panel. This suggests that the problem might arise from the import function trying to figure out what needs to be imported and what doesn’t, whereas “Add to DT3” is just a dumb 1:1 transfer?

While playing with this, I removed all previously imported emails, and also emptied them out of the trash, restarted DT, Mail (but did not reboot yet), so that there would be no issue with “already imported”. Alas, no luck.

Any suggestions for what I might be doing wrong?

Well, obviously when you’re in Mail.app, it doesn’t have to calculate item counts to display like DEVONthink does for the Import > Email sidebar.

Does DEVONthink stall when generating the email list? If so, in DEVONthink, hold the Option key and select Help > Report Bug. But before you send it…

When the application is stalled, do a Spotlight search for Activity Monitor . Select our application in the list of processes - it should show “(Not Responding)” and the name in red - and press Command-Option-S to run a sample on it. When the sample window opens, press the Save button and save it to your Desktop. Please attach this text file to your Support Ticket so we can inspect it. Thanks!

DT3 does not stall. I open the import panel, I select “emails” and DT starts building up the mailbox hierarchy in the panel, takes a few minutes or so. Then it is done. Activity window does not show anything peculiar. Everything looks fine, except, upon comparison with the email count in Mail.app, the number of emails per mailbox disagrees. I have a mailbox with around 5000 messages, and DT import panel showed around 2000. I refreshed the panel, and it showed 600. In some other cases, a refresh leads to a correct number. When I then go ahead and actually archive such a mailbox into DT, once that process finishes (again, no stall, program is responsive all along), I indeed do not have the full number of emails in DT that I have in the corresponding Mail.app mailbox. That’s all I can say.

I now import with “Add to DT3” from Mail.app. That works well, only a few messages don’t get moved over, and for those the DT Log window makes a clear statement like “could not read contents” etc. There are so far a handful or two of those for about 10,000 messages imported, I can live with that. I also don’t need the permanent archive update that “Archive Mail” offers, I just wanted to use it to maintain the mailbox hierarchy automatically. However, I can easily re-establish it from a flat import.