Can someone help me figure out how to get around the fact that DT Pro Office either results in a ‘connection timeout’, or it simply crashes every time I try to import all of my Mail from Apple’s Mail.app 3.0 (Intel MacPro - Leopard v.10.5.2)?
Granted, I have been able to successfully import some of my smaller mailbox folders individually - but considering the fact that I am using Gmail and I of course have Gmail’s typical ‘All Mail’ folder, as soon as I click on that folder to import it, the 20,000+ emails (4.5GB) it contains causes DT to hang and I eventually get one of the two problems I’ve mentioned above…
Does anyone know of a work around, or some other method of importing all of my email into DT that won’t cause these issues?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated… Thanks!
sometimes I have those timeouts too. Here is what works for me when that happens:
close DEVONthink Pro Office and Mail
open Mail and select “Mailbox|Synchronize All Accounts”
open the “Window|Activity” (Cmd+0) display and wait until all tasks are finished
choose “Mailbox|Take All Accounts Offline”
Fire up DTPO and run the import from “File|Import|Email…”
Once everything is imported, you can choose “Mailbox|Take All Accounts Online” in Mail. Please make sure that at least your Gmail Account is configured to keep all messages and attachments as offline copy (Accounts dialog, 3rd tab).
Rationale:
I noticed that DTPO takes Mail offline for the duration of the import. So I figured that when you try to import mail that has not yet been cached by Mail the process runs into a dead end (the “script” waits for Mail to get online and cache the messages, which will not happen as long as the “script” runs).
This of course is just an assumption, but it works for me.
If you experience a crash, please send the CrashReporter log to support@devon-technologies.com with any relevant entries from the Console (in Applications > utilities).
It has not crashed again since the first one or two times that that happened, but I am still not able to have DT import my mail…it repeatedly times out??
As can be seen in the screenshot below, can you just confirm for me that I am supposed to highlight the root [Gmail] folder and then choose ‘Import All’ from the toolbar - that is, if I intend on importing all of my email from Apple Mail 3.0?
I tried following the steps suggested by ssemmier, but they didn’t resolve the issue?
It shouldn’t normally be a problem to import such a quantity of email but I don’t know the specifics of your machine regarding available RAM etc. Why don’t you try it in smaller chunks, starting with the huge Inbox?
I have a quad-core Intel Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM…that’s not the issue
I was able to get the mail imported, by doing it one mailbox at a time…but clicking on the root Gmail folder in an attempt to import all sub-folders all at once still has not worked for me???
Now that I do have all the email in DT, if I were to try ‘Import All’ again (if it works as its supposed to, that is), would DT import only the new mail and/or mail that has been moved/deleted/changed since the last import, or will it try to import everything again creating duplicates (or replicants) of everything instead?
IMAP accounts keep your email stored on their servers (with the logic that you can access it from any computer, anywhere you have Internet access). This is a great idea until you realize that your email often has to travel a looong way to get to your computer. This is why some apps / services allow you to store IMAP email locally (the body without attachments, including inline graphics, etc.). This is always your best bet since the email will be imported from your local disk instead of across the net.
Do note that with 75,000 entries, this may also stall. Consider whether you need to import all 75,000. Just saying.
FWIW, I’ve noticed in recent versions of DEVONthink (DTPO 2.4.3 over here) that even importing one message can take a very long time. I imported a single message yesterday that was a paragraph of plain text,and not part of a conversation at all, but in the course of doing that DTPO three times popped up the message about loading the (entire) sent mail folder, looking for related messages - even without the message being part of a conversation.
That single message took almost two and minutes to load.
Personally, I rarely use File > Import > Email because it is so slow and I don’t care for DEVONthink’s UI for conversations. It’s far easier to merely drag messages into DEVONthink.
