I have recently upgraded to DEVONthink Pro Office and was very impressed by the ease of importing a very large e-mail archive going back many years from Mail.app. It took hours to complete, but the results are very satisfactory.
However, for various reasons, I switched from Mail.app to the Postbox e-mail application (postbox-inc.com) a couple of years ago and was interested in importing my more recent messages from Postbox. I was able to navigate to the .mbox files created by a previous version of the software (Postbox 5) and import them into DEVONthink very smoothly. However, it seems that there was a change of some kind in Postbox’s handling of .mbox files earlier this year with the release of Postbox 6 and the most recent .mbox files are not recognized by DEVONthink.
I think it would be great if support for at least the main alternative e-mail clients for MacOS could be added to the mail import feature of DEVONthink.
I just tried saving a message into a drafts folder to sent to you as an example. As luck would have it, DEVONthink could recognize this folder and import the message I created as a sample. I’m going to try to sort things out with the folks at PostBox and will eventually follow up with an update here. Thank you!
Just something to consider: The list of “main alternative e-mail clients for MacOS” is a bit subjective. Also, the clients need to have support for inter-application communication, ideally a healthy AppleScript library, in order to support them. Some have poor or limited support or none at all. The developers of those apps need to hear from their users about these things.
I take your point regarding the question of which e-mail clients are the main alternatives to Mail.app. The Sweet Setup suggests Airmail, Mailmate, Spark, MailPlane, Outlook, CloudMagic, UniBox, Mail Pilot and MailSpring in addition to Postbox. I guess Thunderbird also still has a following.
I’ve been in touch with the developers at Postbox regarding the problems I was having importing mail from the latest version of their software.
I use Postbox too and wanted to see how the import into DTPO works.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to import any of the MBOX files from Postbox into the latest DTPO (2.10.1)
Apple Mail however does recognize that file correctly and imports all mails from it.
DTPO allows me to select it and somehow seems to load it (folder name appears in the left menu) but no mails to import appear.
I noticed that sometimes DTPO didn’t let me an MBOX file for import - it helped in Postbox to say that all mails should be downloaded (using IMAP here)
Another thing while I wasn’t able to see the mails after opening an MBOX file with DTPO was to look at the MBOX content.
There I found the reason why DTPO doesn’t show any mails:
The linefeed characters are MSDOS based ^M
Received: from mail-sor-f69.google.com (mail-sor-f69.google.com. [209.85.220.69])^M
by mx.google.com with SMTPS id o60-v6sor5403776qvo.32.2018.08.20.17.31.23^M
for <firstname.lastname@example.com>^M
(Google Transport Security);^M
Mon, 20 Aug 2018 17:31:23 -0700 (PDT)^M
So running dos2unix helped and DTPO showed me all the mails in the import dialog.
It would be awesome if this could be somehow integrated into DTPO to recognise this and handle it accordingly.
