Hello all
I am going to change my email provider (moving to Proton Drive) soon, and I am considering, instead of storing my old emails (more than 20 years of emails) into a DEVONthink database, instead of migrating them to Proton.
Is someone using the application in this way, to store general emails and query them? Does it make sense? What are the pros and cons?
(I know it can be done. What I am asking for are personal experiences, to get a feel if it would make sense for me or not)
I suggest that you run a forum search on this topic. It has been discussed many times, people have shared there experiences.
If it were me, I wouldn’t do it. Certainly not for 20 years of email.
My emails are archived in Devonthink
To me, It makes the most sense
Various email services; now using Apple Mail
pro; emails are now organized with other related notes - projects etc.
I used to archive everything in Mail Archiver, but gradually found myself re-archiving specific kinds of mail in DT databases, mainly for integration with DT functionality and workflows, and now barely fire up Mail Archiver, excellent though it is. Killer pro is item links to individual e-mails (also possible with Hookmark); main con is the demise of the wonderful DT plugin after Apple nixed plugins for Mail, since when the friction has gone up a bit and the speed of archiving significantly down.
It’s worth thinking about what kinds of use you currently make of archived e-mail, and the frequency with which you require each. I realised that almost everything I need to find again was in my sent e-mails, either because I was looking up what I said last time I was asked something or because I’d quoted what I was responding to. A DT database of 20 years of your sent e-mails may be quite a good compromise. I refer to mine a lot; it saves a lot of wheel-reinvention, and I’ve built up a lot of link collections so that I can often bypass the need to search.
Why?
Is someone using the application in this way, to store general emails and query them? Does it make sense?
Do you really need to query 20 years of emails? For some people, it could make sense. For many, it doesn’t. And just being able to create a database like this doesn’t mean it’s actually useful. Archival? Sure. Useful? Perhaps not so much. As with many things in computing: there are things you can do that really aren’t worth doing, so don’t do them just because they can be done 
And based on my recent experience dealing with 14 years of emails while testing things, I would do this before messing about with Proton Mail. Otherwise, you’re adding yet another mechanism to an already intensive process.
A mix of trust on privacy commitments, politics, and general unhappiness with Apple (with the focus on services, AI, and the progressive decay of its software). If not for some third party apps I really depend on (DEVONthink is the main one) I would seriously consider moving to Linux.
As a Visionary Supporter for Proton for many years, I can only echo Bluefrog’s remarks: test your use case with Proton before you commit. Besides the odds problems with software quality, it really depents on what you expect from email and how you use it. Only when you use your Proton account with Apple Mail (or another 3rd Party mail application) through the provided bridge, you can export your emails. So if you want to archive your emails in, say, 5 years time outside of Proton and they have stopped the mail bridge, you are out of luck.
Thanks a a lot for all the answers: they were really what I was looking for (not if “it could be done”, which I already knew, but if it made sense).
I think I would follow the advice of trying Mail Archiver before the migration (and, in any case, download everything to some local storage before that).
For what it’s worth, I archive my emails in DT. The only emails in my email accounts are ones I’ve not dealt with yet or haven’t archived yet. I did this originally specifically because of privacy concerns (old emails don’t need to be sitting on someone else’s server when they could be sitting in my drive nice and safe).
I’m a vicious deleter of emails though and find it hard to believe you actually need an archive of 20 years worth of email. Personally: sent items are a must for me since they’ve usually got info I need saving in them. Receipts and long-winded conversations, they get archived too.
Most other things get deleted as soon as they’re read unless there’s an action in them. Actions always get saved (I stick to the adage: if you didn’t write down the action, I’m not doing it - I’ve been burned too many times by verbal requests in the workplace!).
[Put it another way: would you really save 20 years of post and paper memos?]
There are various upsides to this, but the main ones are I know my database only contains useful info (not rubbish emails), I get to use DT’s search function, and the search function in my email inboxes is much better because it’s only searching “live” emails which are there for a reason.
My Devonthink contains now “Paper” from the last almost 50years, and E-Mails from the beginning of E-Mails, besides Adds and Spam.
Why not?
Count me as a holder of decades (32 years and counting) of e-mails, now in an Archives database in DT4.
1994-2025 = 160,000 e-mails, 36,000 attachments (probably <6k e-mails for 2026).
I do, in fact refer back to old e-mails frequently enough to want a view on what I and others have corresponded on in work and personal lives.
I have an AppleScript which separates out attachments over a certain size in the DT4 version. This allows them to be easily relateable to other files and searches I do in DT4. Any it keeps over a certain size are deleted from the underlying .eml data in DT4, reducing the archive size (encoding means attachments are usually 33% larger than unencoded e-mail data.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in these forums, for every person who says “I wouldn’t do it” there’s at least one person who says “Hell yeah, I do it!”.
Sean
Heck yeah, when you suddently need an email for a legal cause… you need the email.
My issue is the scope of DT is so big and I find some things are not imported well.. like pdf page breaks where they should not be. Some CRM do a better job of email integration but rental software IMO on those is borderline extortion. I wish some DT modules would just be able to be fired up with nearly all the features you need to move into DT…
What do you see as the benefits of Mail Archiver vs Devonthink