How to archive a large IMAP mailbox?

DEVONthink
1

I need to archive a large IMAP mailbox with 46.000 mails dating back to 2008, because I reached the quota of my mail provider.

I have the Mail plugin installed and now want to do this:

  • Archive the complete mailbox
  • delete old mails in the IMAP account

I don’t want to lose any mail so I want to be super sure, before I do anything, that can’t be reversed.

So, here are a couple of questions:

  • Will all my mails from Apple Mail be archived, or only those, I can see in the Import view in DT3? (When I open the mailbox in the Import view in DT3, it only shows 17.000 Mails instead of 46.000 in Mail.)
  • What happens, when I press the “Archive Mailbox”-button again after deleting Mails in the IMAP Mailbox? Will the old Mails be purged or do they stay in the archive?

Thanks

2

The numbers are the ones provided by Mail but might be inaccurate actually. After importing/archiving the mailbox DEVONthink logs to number of imported and failed emails. You might also want to disable the junk filter to ensure that all emails are imported.

Already imported/archived emails are skipped.

3

In addition to what @cgrunenberg has sagely suggested, there is a difference between archive and import mail. Read the doc’s.

4

I’ve done this (for 300K mail). I don’t think you should treat DT as the ‘backup’ solution for your mail when you say: I don’t want to lose any mail. Depending on what provider you use I would first look if it’s possible to download e.g. an mbox backup of your mail. Then you would always have a backup to revert to (or put in cold storage).

My other suggestion would be simply to find an e-mail provider with a larger storage quota if you want to keep your mail online. Fastmail provides 30GB or 100GB storage, depending on your subscription.

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5

I regularly move email to DevonThink Pro, but I don’t use the plug-in. Instead, I use Mail’s mbox export. This works flawlessly for me, with large numbers of email messages with no failures. Perhaps there is something in this method that will help you.

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6

Thanks for your tips.
Actually, what I have done now is, created a new local mailbox in Mail and moved a couple of years worth of emails there.
This way I can search in my emails like I used to, at least on the Mac.

To be save, I stored a copy of the mbox folder.
Maybe I’ll import them to DEVONthink some day. I’ll see.