Garbled text appearing in Finder Comments of email notes imported from Evernote

This isn’t a DT3 bug, just a heads-up about an odd behavior of converted emails I encountered while transitioning from Evernote to DT3.

I have hundreds of emails that I forwarded into Evernote, mostly payment receipts or order confirmations, that were converted to formatted notes when I imported them into DT3. I have found that many (most?) of these have text in the Finder Comments field in DT3, ranging from a few apparently random words or the name of the company who sent the email, to what appears to be garbled descriptive text attached to images imbedded in the email. For example, a receipt from Audible.com has the cover image of the purchased audiobook and three more of recommended books; the Finder Comments show fragmented text from publisher blurbs about those books.

None of this text appears in the Finder Get Info pane for the indexed files, only in the DT3 Finder Comments in the Inspector.

I can remove the Finder Comments by batch-processing in DT3 (I don’t want such extraneous stuff cluttering my files and possibly turning up in searches, and I might want the Finder Comments field for my own use); however, I question why this is happening in the first place. Similar emails added directly from Mail to DT3 don’t display any Finder Comments, either as an .eml file or if converted to a formatted note. So it appears that Evernote must do something peculiar to emails forwarded into it.

Given that it’s likely many more Evernote users will be looking for alternatives now that the legacy EN app has been completely scrapped (as of 23 Mar 2024), current and potential DT3 users should at least be aware of this odd behavior of converted emails.

Finder comments exist only in Apple filesystems… Therefore I doubt that Evernote as a cloud service adds them.

This is most likely Evernote’s OCR data (as requested).

Aha! I’m sure you’re right – it closely resembles the kind of garbled text seen in OCR “transcriptions” of newspaper articles. Thanks for clearing that up.