Archive & retain imported emails after deleting from Gmail?

I have imported my emails via the Archive Mailbox option and see all of them OK within DTPO 2.5.2. However once I delete the email from my IMAP account (e.g. Gmail), DTPO will synchronize to also reflect this deleted email (i.e. it will be removed from DTPO’s database).

Is there an option somewhere to keep these emails within DTPO?

I’d like to keep a super archive of ALL emails in similar function to Outlook’s Archive function on Windows, while making my email client leaner & more responsive.

I’ve browsed around the manual & searched these forums for answers to no avail.

Thank you for any assistance!

I couldn’t recreate that here running Archive Mailbox from the File > Import > Email… toolbar with a selected mailbox from a non-Gmail IMAP account (managed with Apple Mail).

It sort of sounds like the archived messages were indexed instead of copied into the database, but I have no clue how that might have happened. If you run Tools > Show Info… on one of those messages I’d expect Path to have a ./eml/ as its prefix if the document is in the database.

Thank you for your reply and comment.

The actual individual emails are indeed stored locally in the database after archiving as they are made visible by the “Show in Finder” command.

However once I delete any email from my Gmail/IMAP account (via Entourage 2008 or Outlook 2011 or logging directly into the Gmail account online; I don’t use Apple Mail), DTPO will also delete that email from its local database upon doing another “Archive Mailbox”.

The question is: How do I keep those emails in the DTPO database from being deleted?

Perhaps describing step by step will clarify a bit further:

b[/b] Archive Mailbox via the Import Mail window.
b[/b] Outlook 2011 opens in the background.
b[/b] Progress bar appears & updates the messages.
b[/b] Close the Import Email window. Mails appear fine in DTPO’s database.
b[/b] Delete a message or 2 from within Outlook or Entourage or logged in to the Gmail account.
b[/b] Return to DPTO & repeat Archive Mailbox routine.
b[/b] Close window & peek at the updated DTPO database.
b[/b] Deleted emails from Gmail are no longer available in DTPO.

I’d like to prevent those emails from being deleted from the database.

Ahh, I didn’t test that. Maybe later …

Sounds like Archive Mailbox is doing a type of synching between the mailbox and database copy that’s causing the behavior you’ve described. I don’t know if its different with different email clients and don’t have the resources to check.

Without more testing the only idea that comes to mind would be renaming the imported mailbox group so that Archive Mailbox might not find it on subsequent usage. But if it works like that I’d expect you’d also lose DtPO’s knowledge of previously imported messages.

Thanks for the clarification. Pretty sure I understand your issue well enough now to attempt reproducing it again, though only with Apple Mail as the client, and hopefully have a solution to offer (if someone else doesn’t beat me to it :slight_smile:).

I’m doing some research into upgrading from DTPro to DTPO, specifically around email archiving.

I’ve resurrected this old thread because it seems to address my key concern.

My thought with DTPO is to use it as the key storage location for my old email, and clear out Apple Mail (which is linked to Gmail). But if I archive, and then delete the emails from the Gmail/Apple Mail store, will the next Archive delete these from DTPO?

I know this is an old thread, but hopeful that some light can be shed upon this.

It seems kind of redundant to have to keep the full email store in both Apple Mail and DevonThink on the local drive.

Imported mail is imported – it is not synced to Google.

Please don’t take the forum’s word – test these things for yourself. Import some test messages from your Google account in Apple Mail and then delete them from Google. Nothing happens to the content in DEVONthink.

Thanks korm - and I assume archived mail is treated in the same way?

Importing and archiving are the same, under the covers. The difference in the mail Import interface is that “Import” is usually used when you want to pick and choose specific messages to copy to your database(s). “Archive” applies to an entire mailbox. The first time you archive a mail box, everything is copied to your database. The next, and subsequent times, only “new” messages are copied. In other words DEVONthink looks at what you’ve already archived, and what is in the mailbox, and copies just the new messages that it doesn’t find in the database. It’s not syncing because if you delete messages in the mailbox they are not deleted in the database, and vice versa.

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Thanks so much for that detailed response - very helpful and reassuring.

I’ve been a long-time user of DevontThink Pro, but the Office features are all new to me.

Looking forward to getting access to in-app OCR and email management.