Is there a way when archiving e-mail to include attachments? Thanks.
Use DEVONthink Pro Office, which has a dedicated Import for email working with Apple Mail, Microsoft Entourage, PowerMail 5.x, BareBones Mailsmith, and all email applications using standard Unix mailboxes, e.g., Thunderbird or GNUmail.
I use this daily with Apple Mail and it works like a charm!
/Sven
PS: this was the reason I upgraded to DTPO, as I do not really have a use for OCR.
I do have DT Pro. However, when I add message from Apple Mail to mail archive database attachment doesn’t come with it.
That is weird. I just double-check my mail archive in DTPO. I have plenty of mails with attachments. PDF attachments are even displayed inline.
I suggest you capture the console output (using the Console application in the Utilities Folder of Mac OS X), when using the Mail Import. Probably there will be some useful debug information.
Maybe as a first step a re-install of DTPO could help.
/Sven
clabber, there’s a difference between DT Pro’s scripts for creating plain text versions of email messages, and the more sophisticated mail archiving provided in DT Pro Office.
Attachments are not brought over in DT Pro mail messages added to the database. But they are brought over in rich text versions of email by DT Pro Office.
Argh. I understood he has DTP Office. Mea culpa.
@clabber: I highly recommend to try the eval copy and later upgrade. Not only are the attachments included but you also have a more clean header, threaded mail archive and duplicate detection.
I do have DT Pro Office. When I highlight a message in Apple Mail and select Add to Devonthink Pro Office I get the text but not the attachments.
I guess you’re using the AppleScript menu in the right-hand corner of the menubar? These are obsolete and should be removed.
If that is not the case and you are using the menu item in the Mailbox or Message menus, make sure that the attachments are stored locally on your machine in Mail’s Account preferences. Other than that I cannot imagine why the attachments would not be archived in the message.
I do use menu item in Apple Mail (under Message, on the left). I’ve looked at Apple Mail preferences both locally and on the web but see no way to store attachments locally.
In Mail open the Preferences, click on Accounts. Select an account, go to the Advanced tab. There check the value for “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” this should be set to “All messages and their attachments”.
What happens if you run the Mail Import window inside DTPO? It normally warns against missing attachment data when you use the “Import” button for thaty specific mailbox or message.
There is no such value under advanced tab (I can send you a screen shot if you like).
I did a test importing mail inside DTPRO office. Mail was imported successfully without attachments or warning.
Well, then I can only conclude that there was no attachment data in the MIME messages retrieved from Mail. The import process tries to preserve such data at all costs in case of parsing failures, even if it means that you will get a binary file attachment representing the original data of the imported message.
I would guess no errors were logged in the Log tool of DTPO, or any messages logged in the Console application?
And what kind of mail account is it? Exchange by any chance? Because for both POP and IMAP/.Mac accounts this preference to save attachments locally should be present.
I’ve pasted in contents of console that I think correspond to mail import test I ran. And yes my mac account it POP.
2008-01-08 10:12:37.870 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:12:53.092 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:13:14.484 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:13:29.709 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:13:45.034 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:13:52.144 DEVONthink Pro[862] Unknown: fcharset2
2008-01-08 10:14:15.737 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:14:30.956 DEVONthink Pro[862] RTFDWithHTML:baseURL:allowRemoteRequest: (NSTextStorage):
NSPortTimeoutException
connection timeout: did not receive reply
2008-01-08 10:14:45.406 DEVONthink Pro[862] Processed 106 mail messages from “Apple Mail”; imported: 106, failures: 0, duplicates: 0
What I would like you to do is the following:
- In Mail, select a message with an attachment that is not being transferred to DTPO.
- Go to the File > Save As… menu
- In the Save panel that appears, select “Raw Message Source” as the Format.
- Compress this file that you just saved in the Finder.
Then email that zip file together with the resulting file that you got in DTPO to support@devon-technologies.com. I’ll take a look at it.
I have imported most of my old Entourage/Apple Mail into DTPO. Recently I noticed that some of the attachments are corrupted and appear in “machine text” in the message.
It starts like this:
–B_3293808381_2251392
Content-type: application/pdf; name=“filename-of-attachment.pdf”;
x-mac-creator=“4341524F”;
x-mac-type=“50444620”
Content-disposition: attachment;
filename=“filename-of-attachment.pdf”
Content-transfer-encoding: base64
JVBERi0xLjcNJeLjz9MNCjExOCAwIG9iag08PC9MaW5lYXJpemVkIDEvTCAxMDYxODQ5MS9P
IDEyMy9FIDIzNzY3L04gMS9UIDEwNjE2MDg4L0ggWyA5MTYgMjcyXT4+DWVuZG9iag0gICAg
ICAgICAgIA14cmVmDTExOCAzMQ0wMDAwMDAwMDE2IDAwMDAwIG4NCjAwMDAwMDEzNTcgMDAw
(etc etc)
I’m having the impression that this only applies to PDF attachments that were sent out of Adobe Acrobat (ie, where Acrobat did the actual attaching to the Entourage message). Other attachments (PPT, DOC, the occasional PDF) appear as icons in the message, so that’s fine.
Is there any way these garbled attachments can be recovered?
Thanks
You could try to cut the text from “–B_3293808381_2251392” onwards of the message into a new text file and use a tool such as “Decoder” to convert the contents.
Worked like a charm!
Thanks!