Forward or send ONE email to Devonthink?

I’d like to be able to capture one email at a time, create a text note (including the active links in the body) in Devonthink from one email at time or from a IMAP folder. My email accounts have far too many emails and grabbing them all with an import is not needed. But I’d like to be able to “send” an email to Devonthink. I can’t seem to find this use case in the community board.

Thank you al in advance.

You can drag and drop from Mail to DEVONthink.
You can also use the Message > Add to DEVONthink 3 (assuming you’re running Pro or Server) or the Script menu > Add message(s) to DEVONthink in Mail.

Or if you use webmail (or some other mail app which does not allow drag/drop) then you can send specific email to Devonthink from email using Zapier and an indexed Dropbox folder.

Yes but no one uses webmail since it’s not a proper email client :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

And of course nobody uses iOs because it is not a proper operating system :slight_smile:

because it is not a proper operating system

Okay - I totally agree with that :smiley:

Right like Gmail our business email provider :wink:
Zapier is OK with parsing emails but I’ve had some issues.
I think though yes getting the email to a readable file for Indexing is the trick so far.
I wonder if .eml even could ever work?
Thanks both!

As a comparison. Both PBWorks and Trello and other hosted project management systems do a good job.

I use the Mailplane for Gmail. It is basically the Chrome interface in a stand alone program. Mailplane has a “Save Clip…” function that can clip a single email with or without attachments directly into Devonthink. I just used it a few minutes ago. It gives you a note with the body of the email, titles the note with the email subject line, and includes the link back. This also works with OmniFocus.

1 Like

Of course! Sorry to be so vague!
I am thinking of this discussion.

Especially this response:

The references to Zapier and an indexed Dropbox folder are what I don’t understand. But more generally it seems rather hard to just get an email into DT unless one uses Apple Mail. Unlike Evernote, Kindle or Dropbox itself, which let you forward the email to the app as if it were any other recipient.

I am guessing that perhaps there is a way to use Send to Dropbox to land the emails in a folder that DT can then access. But that’s a guess. Hence my question to the good people of this forum.

You’ve posted in the wrong thread :slightly_smiling_face:

Why not just use Apple Mail ? :thinking:

I’m in the midst of evaluating a migration from Evernote to Devonthink. I’m surprised to discover that there is no way to easily forward an email to Devonthink? This is a staple in my workflow from Evernote. and Omnifocus. And Asana. and Amazon Kindle. And… email2app is a pretty staple feature these days. it was a core part of my Evernote workflow, and I’m debating whether I can live without it in moving to Devonthink. Very surprised Devon does not provide a personalized sendto address that lets you submit single messages this way into your Inbox :confused:

Welcome @ek12

This is not a mechanism found in all apps and the ones you are discussing provide some kind of cloud service or are web-related applications.

Perhaps this is of interest…

Also, there are many ways to get data into DEVONthink. See the Help > Documentation > In & Out chapter.

1 Like

Okay, we’re bolding. well it IS a mechanism in all of those apps that I mention, which are the apps I use for my every-day (and every-minute) workflow. So it’s mission critical for the way I work.

Thanks for the reply.

I think this helped me grok a core architectural assumption I’d made that is incorrect.

All of the apps I use (and also Day One, and Apple Notes, and Evernote, and Microsoft One Note, and Bear, and …) are device agnostic, and provide a cloud data store that you can access from any device. Whereas I’m realizing Devonthink is very much an on-device-only installed app, admittedly with some “to-go” remote access and some folder-syncing via Dropbox or other cloud service.

This helps me reset my expectations. (And will probably exclude Devonthink from my consideration, which is a bummer, because in COVID for now I happen to be parked full time in front of one device, and it looks quite viable for me in that use case!)

again, thanks for the reply and the help to understand the architecture.

I do appreciate the tip that I could apple-script a way to do this! I’m also grokking devonthink is a DIY tool in the respects, which is great but not what I’m looking for – I don’t personally want to invest time to re-build tech that already exists by default in those apps.

i think to characterise DEVONthink as a DIY application would be a mistake. just my two bits after a decade of use. many here in this forum love to do DIY with apple scripts and post here, but that is surely the exception by exceptional people and not the norm.

2 Likes

And adding to that, for me it is essential that DT does not use a cloud architecture (and despite that offers simple, fast sync via Bonjour). Obviously that doesn’t mean it suits your needs - I’m only posting in case Devontech were thinking “damn, we’ll rewrite DT3 to be cloud based” :wink:

And yes, I’m getting old (oh or I’m too young) - I had to look up “to grok”.

2 Likes

thanks @BLUEFROG @rmschne and Blanc (community will only let me at-mention 2 of you, sorry) for the quick engagement and helpful content!

1 Like

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

1 Like

yeah, so far of all of these note taking apps, Day One has the best security option – multiple databases (they call them vaults), available on any device concurrently, each vault encrypted with private keys. so you can access them from any device, but you need the keys, and you can enable 2FA. much more secure than e.g. Evernote! unfortunately for me Day One’s intended as more of a journal and is not feature complete to replace Evernote for the way I use it.

Conversely, I love Devonthink’s nested-tagging architecture, which mirrors my workflow in Omnifocus and is light years ahead of Evernote.

…and now realizing I’ve taken this thread off topic, apologies and </eom>