With the Pro or Server edition of DEVONthink, you can archive and organize your emails in your databases. Fortunately, emails have certain identifying attributes you can use for finding, organizing, or acting on those documents.
These email attributes aren’t interchangeable, so it’s worth being clear about their distinction.
- Author: the name of who is sending the email.
- From: The sender’s email address.
- Recipient: the name of who receives the email.
- To: The recipient’s email address.
- Subject: The subject line of the email.
If you use tags for your organizing, enable DEVONthink’s Settings > Files > Tags > Convert properties to tags. Imported emails will be tagged with all the properties available on the email, except the subject. You can now view emails in the tags of your database. Also, these tags can be used on any other items in your database, e.g., tagging a project or an invoice with specific vendor or peoples’ names.
While tags can still be used, another approach is creating smart groups (or smart rules), with criteria matching on those fields. For a broad match, add criteria Kind is Email and Recipient is Darth Vader. If the person has multiple email addresses, you can instead use To is skyw_anakin@empire.gov. Or get even more specific by including a subject, e.g., Subject is Sink dripping in Detention Block AA-23, sub-level five, Cell 2187.
You can also create a smart group to match certain email attributes and then run different commands on them, including filing, labeling, assessing via external AI, etc. Or even create a smart rule and use an event trigger like On Import, to process your emails automatically.