How to deal with Mail?

DEVONthink Scenarios
1

Hi, I’m using a bunch of Mail accounts. Mostly IMAP. I use my accounts from several computers. I have setup Mail.app with a bunch of intelligent postboxes to manage my mail. And I use the build in search feature, highlight related mails etc. all the time.

As I keep all my mails, this works very good. It takes me seconds to find what I need, even with more than 200.000 mails.

Some questions when using DT together with mails:

  1. Are mails copied to DT when I import them?

  2. Is there a way that DT works on the mail data without copying it into it’s own realm?

  3. Can DT directly work with my mail accounts? I don’t like the idea of using Mail.app for the “newer” things and DT for the “older” things. As I have to switch back and forth and have a fragmented information base.

2

Yes.

Not yet but in a future release it might be possible to index the folder ~/Library/Mail.

No.

3

Ok, thanks.

Yes, please go for option 2. My ~/Library/Mail folder is 7GB big. And there is no need to have two copies of this data in a system.

4

Yes, yes. Please, Please!

Indexing an already huge Mail folder and keeping it in sync, without making duplicates, allowing all the power of DevonThink as an alternate interface to finding information would be extremely welcome. To put it very mildly :smiley:

5

A prototype of 2. is already working over here but needs some more work. Something for a 2.x release :wink:

6

Good news! We eagerly await implementation! :smiley:

7

So far the only workaround I’ve found is to index the ‘Messages’ folder within the *.mbox or *.imapmbox in user/Library/Mail/mail_account/
Being a folder it lets you index and synchronize its content easily, the only issue is you won’t see the mail title but the message name instead : number.emlx…
If DT was able to grab the title from those messages and display them it would be all fine.
Just my 0.02