I hope this is not violating the forum rules because I had submitted a support ticket regarding exactly the same issue already a week ago, but since its outcome wasn’t really satisfying and I’m interested in how other people are experiencing DEVONthink Pro’s feature to import e-mails from Apple Mail, I would like to share my thoughts also here in the forum:
I have been an enthusiastic user of DEVONthink Pro since more than 10 years now but actually I have never used the e-mail import feature very much. Over the years I had just imported single e-mails via the mail script „Add message(s) to DEVONThink“ in Apple Mail which always worked fine, as far as I can remember.
But this time I needed to get access to approximately 80.000 old e-mails, grouped in mailboxes of about 10.000 e-mails each, which I had exported from Apple Mail into .mbox-archives years ago.
Now I wonder, what the ideal process/method would be to import large amounts of e-mails into DEVONthink Pro. Because every method I’ve tried so far actually failed (the app did permanently stop responding and every attempt to import e-mails resulted in permanent spinning ball symptoms). I also tried the same with DEVONthink Pro Office, which was not better at all.
The first thing I tried was to import an .mbox export from Apple Mail with approx. 10.000 e-mails. First, I tried to drag-and-drop the mbox-file on the appliation icon of DEVONthink Pro, like described as a valid option in the DEVONthink Pro manual. But this just imported 3 files: Info.plist, mbox, table_of_contents, no separate e-mails.
Then I tried to first re-import the e-mails to Apple Mail and from there to DEVONthink Pro Office via the Import command from DEVONthink Pro Office. But already the import window, where all Apple mailboxes were shown, was not responding any longer. DEVONthink crashed.
Also via the command from Apple Mail (DEVONthink Mail plugin) DEVONthink Pro Office stopped responding and I had to force quit both Apple Mail and DEVONthink. And drag-and-drop of multiple singular .eml-files from Apple Mail also stopped DEVONthink Pro (Office) to respond.
Has anyone experienced any smooth way to get large amounts of e-mails into DEVONthink Pro? I’ve also tried the same with EagleFiler, which actually saved my life because I needed to get access to thousands of e-mails during the last weekend. In EagleFiler the same mailboxes (.mbox-files exported from Apple Mail) could be imported without any problem very smoothly and fast with one import task for each mailbox.
Isn’t there an easy way to import big amounts of e-mails into DEVONthink Pro in one batch process like it works with EagleFiler? I cannot believe that EagleFiler could be head and shoulders better than DEVONthink Pro in this standard discipline of just importing old e-mail archives.
I also wonder, why it is not possible in DEVONthink Pro to select the text of imported e-mails. And also, instead of attachments (on which I could click to open them) I always see a default icon showing a question mark in DTP. EagleFiler also shows attachments not with question marks but with standard paperclip icons and it lets you select and copy the text of e-mails, which is not possible in DEVONthink Pro.
Is there any chance that e-mail import will be improved regarding speed, stability and usability in the next version of DEVONthink Pro? I use OS X 10.11.3 (clean install), a MacBook Pro (2,2 GHz Intel Core i7) with 16GB RAM, which should actually meet the requirements for such an operation…