DEVONthink Mail plugin under macOS Sonoma

As @chrillek and @BLUEFROG say: smart rule, these are powerful and invaluable I have found. There will for sure be some identifying feature of the import you can pick up to create a smart rule. It is worth exploring them anyway and many fire ‘on import’. However you do the import I believe.

It is worth it, smart rules are pretty much self explanatory once you get into them. I would advise just making one rather than learning prior from the manual as it were, though you can consult back.
In fact the smart rules in DEVONthink 3 are, for non coders and non power users like me, the best I know of: there are no trip ups like one usually finds.

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Smart rules were developed with non-programmers in mind and accomplish many things with simple actions.

While this prefixes with YYYYMMDD instead of YYMMDD, this is how simple it can be…

No scripting at all.
And the tag is added / used as a simple way to make sure to filter out already renamed emails.

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I think that should be Tag is not renamed

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Corrected. Thanks.

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Thanks Bluefrog. That’s perfect but for one thing (ignorance showing here). How do I enter the string Creation Year, Creation Month, Creation Day, Name. Must be something like AND in between each of them?

Should I attach that rule to the DT Inbox, so I can later move the email to a particular database? Or do I have to make a Smart Rule for each database?

Click in the dialogue box and a drop down menu will appear. It will have all kinds of placeholders, as DEVONthink 3 calls them. Depending on the action you have chosen the placeholders will be relevant to that.
They will change when the rule is triggered to whatever is the actual date, name or whatever. There is no need to punctuate them either. If you wish you can put text of your own in between them, commas or whatever you wish.
The placeholders are, what in other programs and apps sometimes called ‘Variables’.

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I have always thought that drag and drop is much simpler than message>add to DevonThink 3.

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I’ve been on Macs so long, drag and drop is as natural as breathing. It’s the first thing I try in any app. :slight_smile:

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I haven’t been able to drag and drop from either Apple Mail or Outlook. For Outlook the Log says “Item does not exist” and for Apple Mail it says “Import of 1 messages failed.” For Apple Mail it merely says “Apple Mail” under File/Action.

For Outlook it gives a path:

7/2/23, 11:06:45 AM: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Outlook/Data/tmp/7B5EFC4C-2ACE-4534-9318-035F34866FA2/[Email subject]

While I can drag/drop from Mail, I only get an “INETLOC” type of document, basically an URL pointing to the message on the server. Not very convenient, I think.

The process is hit-or-miss. I can usually drag messages into DEVONthink from Mail and usually they arrive as .eml files, but not always. And the setting to “load remote images in messages” doesn’t work.

The AppleMail Plugin is an important factor in my workflow as well.

Fortunately, for storing single emails, drag and drop or printing and saving as PDF to DevonThink would be OK either.

But what about archiving all mails, my Devonthink Mail Archive is the gem in my daily work… I do not know though whether this is related to the PlugIn as well.

And finally – I only use Apple Mail because of the Devonthink integration. I would prefer other clients like Spark (or Thunderbird), and if there is a way for Devonthink to develop a module that saves to Devonthink (with choice for the destination, like nowadays with Apple Mail) and sequentially add integrations into other Mail clients, I would happily leave AppleMail untouched in the AppStore.

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Did you enable full disk access for DEVONthink 3 in the system settings?

I agree Maria, the ability to archive large numbers of e-mails each month is a killer feature for me too.

View > Sidebar > Import > E-Mail works also without an installed/supported plugin. But it’s slower.

The setting does not affect the standard view which is based on Quick Look.

Yes. Rebuilding the mailbox by deleting the databases (mail, not DT) in the library helped.

Fine. I suggest mentioning in the settings explanation for that tab that pops up when the ? is clicked that images only load in the alternative view.

I’m sure @bluefrog will take care of this.