DEVONthink is a place for all types of documents, including emails. With the Pro or Server edition, you can archive emails and send documents directly from your database. In DEVONthink 4, we’ve now improved email importing capabilities to overcome limitations caused by Apple’s discontinuation of Mail plugins. Additionally, you can now archive attachments more conveniently and there are new options for automated email sending.
In Settings > Files > Emails, you can now define a hotkey for importing a mailbox or selected emails in Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook*. For those who previously used the plugin, set them to ⌃⌥⌘M for messages and ⇧⌃⌥⌘M for mailboxes and it will feel like it did before.
Separating attachments from emails in your database is now easier. Select an email in DEVONthink and choose Tools > Import Email Attachments to import them as separate documents. If you want to always import them separately, enable Settings > Files > Emails > Message Content: Import attachments.
As that may also bring in unwanted attachments, alternatively control the imports with an Import Email Attachments smart rule action or the import attachments of AppleScript command.
Use two new options to send specific documents to someone, e.g., a timesheet to your employer: a new reminder action, Send Email With Attachment lets you send a document on schedule (as shown in the screenshot), and the new smart rule action Send Mail > With Attachments.
And of course, the same alternate options are still supported: drag and drop, importing emails from UNIX mailboxes, application scripts, and Apple Mail rule scripts.
We hope these changes make processing and storing your emails in DEVONthink at least as good as it used to be, and hopefully even better! Read more about this topic in the chapter Tasks > Handling Emails of the help or the user handbook.
It’s not a major thing and I think it had started happening on DT3 before I upgraded to DT4, but I drag and drop emails into my database and for a while now I get an error saying that it’s a duplicate email and will be skipped. However, it’s not a duplicate email and DT doesn’t skip it (I know because I see it appear in the group I was dropping it in).
As I said, it’s been happening a while and I mostly ignore it, but since we’re talking about emails I thought I’d mention it as I’m not sure what’s triggering the error message.
Maybe you have set up a script that automatically imports emails so there are, in fact, dupes? Have you tried to search for the ominous duplicate that DEVONthink claims exists?
Speaking of email, specifically, Apple mail, I would still love a way to “replicate“ the items in my Apple mail database into DT on an ongoing basis, so that DT becomes repository for all of the information without having to duplicate the mail database by inputting it into DT.
That way DT becomes the major system repository for important information. (And come to think of it it would be great to be able to keep all of the text message databases replicated into DT as well.)
This seems like such a major win for DT users, i’m wondering if, and hoping that, workarounds have been found. I’m all ears.
Blue frog, thanks for pointing that out. I had in fact already read that and everything else that I can find regarding email to Devon think and the article you just pointed to clearly solves one problem.
But that’s presupposes that all of the email messages have been “imported“ into Devon think, whereas I am trying to come up with some method to “replicate“ the messages that are in the Apple mail store WITHOUT having the burden of a second copy of every message in Devon think. Basically I’d like the email messages to remain in the Apple mail store, but allow Devon think to “ replicate“ and hence not bear the burden of two copies of the email message on the system.
i’m aware that this used to work until Apple changed something, but I’m hoping that you or some user has come up with a functional workaround.
I suspect the ever-changing nature of how Mail is programmed to behave (differing folders as versions change, who-knows-what support files to keep track of everything, and the fact that Apple uses a proprietary .emlx format to encode metadata about e-mails), I doubt very much the developers of DEVONthink could be expected to take on Apple Mail-based replicants in DEVONthink, nor do I think they’d be interested.
But I don’t speak for them, of course.
I can see the appeal, but if you aren’t already, it might be time to get religious and pray
If I understand correctly, you’d like to index email messages like you can also index files. This is hard to do in a compatible way as for files there’s a file on disk with a clear path to it. For email, there are proprietary links that one can get from Apple Mail, with a bit of effort and luck, but for other email clients this works differently — or not at all.
And in the end, for making email message searchable DEVONthink would need to import their full text anyway which is, minus images and attachments, almost all there is to an email
Not in my opinion. E-mail as well as text messages are full of junk and (not necessarily white) noise. Making that available unconditionally in yet another app and eating away at its resources without any obvious advantage? Not for me.
If you want to “replicate” your e-mail(s) in DT, you could experiment with IMAP URLs or the message IDs or something like that.
And, “speaking of e-mail” - it’s not really the client that is the important thing here but the server. Apple Mail is but an interface to an arbitrary number of (mostly) IMAP servers. As is any other client. You’d want software to talk to the servers, not the client.
Like sections on building plans, there’s always more than one way to look at things.
It doesn’t seem like an enforced system is being asked for, but an option, so I think you’re safe even if the feature were to be implemented.
As I said before, I can see the appeal (less so for text messages, but horses for courses!), but also the probably insurmountable technical challenges (and the cries of “unfair!” if Outlook, Thunderbird, and other mail clients are not similarly catered to), so I’ll utilise the existing support for my yearly archives.
I can’t see the devs wanting to worth through not only the vagaries of different clients, but the different server behaviours, even in a standard like IMAP (Apple and Google do things differently, and who knows what they’ll do in the future?), or in Exchange.
If a user is willing and able to handle the additional storage usage, e-mails could be imported and given a message:// URL (either builtin URL metadata field, of a custom URL metadata field) to refer back to the original message in Mail. These are pretty easy to generate from the DEVONthink UUID or item URL, or the message’s Message-ID, whether at time of import or some time later.
I’ve considered generating these in my attachment separating script, but have resisted so far as my intention is to delete the messages in Mail.
But that sort of thing is likely to be the closest to the OP’s requested feature for the foreseeable.
Thanks Jim for this information. I have checked the complete Help documentation of which this posting was part, but I miss the specific sequence of steps needed to import specific email messages. The beauty of the Apple Mail plug-in was of course that you select a particular item and tell it where you wanted it in DT. What you describe is the other way around: setting or using a path from DT to Apple Mail (or other client) to import a particular item, or multiples. As it is, saving an email message to Finder and importing that into DT works fine for me. I recognise the attraction of what you describe, but the set of steps needed to import, or find, a particular item, is still not clear to me. Best regards, Paul.
