E-Mail import in Devonthink 3 blocks interaction

I have upgraded to Devonthink 3. While email is importing, no other activity in the program is possible. Isn’t this supposed to be a background process that allows continued interaction with other databases? Importing a large set of emails made the application unusable for days.

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Which email client and macOS version do you use? In case of Apple Mail - did you install & enable the plugin for Apple Mail?

not the OP but I just had the same problem, took hours to import a bunch of emails and locked up my entire machine for almost 24 hours. My machine is runing High Sierra 10.13.6 and I do ahv ehte mail plug-in installed but I did my import by dragging the messages across from mail into DT3.

Another question is whether by doing that I got all the attachments too. I’ve looked in the manual but it’s not clear whether doing the drag to import does include attachments or not. I can’t tell wen I click on one whether the attachment is really in DT or is still out in mail files.

In case of drag & drop the plugin isn’t even used and this should be really fast usually. If this should happen again, then please launch Apple’s Activity Monitor application (see Applications > Utilities), choose the frozen DEVONthink 3 in the list of processes, select the menu item View > Sample Process and send the result to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com. Thanks in advance!

Emails are never stripped or modified while importing/archiving, therefore they should include the attachments.

It’s a consistent problem. Sent a fle just now. An import af about 1300 messages has been going for over 4 hours and still not done.

Just did a quick calculation in 4 hours 24 minutes the system only has imported 503 messages.

Are the messages located in IMAP/Exchange accounts? Are their attachments locally cached?

Nearly all of my mail accounts are POP accounts, even my Google mail account. All attachments are downloaded to my machine. I never leave messages on the server for longer than it takes to retrieve them with 1 account exception. I have 1 IMAP account that I receive billing data on but I very rarely archive any of those messages, it’s a throw away account. I typically read, process and delete them within a week. I have a total of 16 different email accounts right now but I have messages from older accounts that are no longer active stored in my system. I also use a number of Mail rules to sort mail into appropriate buckets for processing on a schedule based on urgency. I use SpamSieve as my only spam checker. I have upgraded over the years always as an upgrade of the system even when I moved to a new machine I used a bootable backup to move everything over to the new machine via migration. I have emails that date back to my old Mac systems that were just before the switch to the PowerPC processor. I’ve been through several mail clients, in and out, over the years but always imported to included all old email at every system and app conversion. Current numbers of stored emails are at something over 60K messages but I haven’t actually verified the current numbers.

Instead of drag & drop you could also try Email > Add to DEVONthink 3 in Apple Mail or View > Sidebar > Import in DEVONthink 3. This processes the emails in the background. Just ensure that the plugin for Apple Mail is installed & enabled.

Plug-in shows up as installed.
33%20AM
But there isn’t any option under Mail Prefs General to look at plugins to verify that it is enabled.

However, I do have the import available in email. Just that when I do that it doesn’t import into the proper location within the database. It always puts the messages into the first group in my email database not the one I have selected in the DT3 database so import doesn’t work for me.

Do you still use (High) Sierra?

You could enable the group selector in Preferences > Import.

Yes, I’ve got a development laptop I use for LambTracker programming work that cannot go past High Sierra. I need to keep both of my machines in sync in terms of operating system. I am hoping to replace the development machine this fall, but I’m waiting for Black Friday specials or deals. Then I’ll move probably all the way up to Catalina. This project, the cleaning and archiving of old email is in part to prepare for a nuke and pave reset of my current Mac when I get the new laptop and decide to upgrade this machine.

Thanks. I totally missed that.

Hi, Thanks for responding. Mojave 10.14.6 and Apple Mail version 12.4. I have not installed any particular version of Mail. It’s just the most recent iteration according to the system. Yes, the plug in is installed but I use drag and drop via the sorter. Cheers, Chris

How many emails did you drop? Are they located in an IMAP/POP3/Exchange account?

A lot. 6,000+ Yes, IMAP and Exchange accounts. The background process using the plugin does work better. Nonetheless, it would be very nice if drag and drop between Mail and D3 dropped import into the background and did not block interaction with the rest of the program.