Import Mail as RTF

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Is it possible to change the behavior of “Add to DEVONthink Pro Office” so that emails are added as RTF (instead of eml)? I know I can convert them after importing into DTP, but the converted files lose the correct creation date.

2

I assume that your purpose is to use Find inside the message content and/or to be able to clip all or part of the message. That can be done by changing the display from Quick Look to rich text, via the little ‘Text’ button in the address bar.

Alternatively, select a message and use the contextual menu option, ‘Open With’. The default application will be Mail (for Apple Mail messages) and the message will be opened within Mail for using Find, clipping text, opening attachments, etc.

Does either approach satisfy your needs?

3

Thanks for the response, Bill. The goal of importing emails as RTF is to allow editing the messages, and to allow having the entire message, headers included, in the body of the file, so that one could Select All and copy, etc. In fact, I do not see the advantage of saving emails as eml. Perhaps this could be an option selectable in Preferences?

4

You can already switch to an alternate “rich text” view via the navigation bar right above the document/view.

5

Of course you can, but you cannot edit the file without converting it first.

6

The rich text email messages of DT Pro Office 1.x were also not editable documents. They could be copied, but not modified.

7

I am well aware of that. Why does this preclude adding the option to easily import as RTFs?!

8

Another reason to import the e-mail as plain text or RTF is that .eml files cannot be shown in de webinterface of DT Pro.
Or the web-engine needs to be adapted, the .eml or .emlx files are just plain text files containing the e-mail and it’s headers.

I have store communication, invoices etc by e-mail in DT and I can find them using the search function in the webinterface, but they cannot be shown, when selecting a .eml document I get the message ‘This document type cannot be dislayed’.
I prefer the mail.app plugin for importing into DT because it goes faster and I can import multiple mailbox folder in one go.

9

Here is a kludge: Select a message in Mail, and choose the DTP script Copy Selection. This creates an RTF in the selected database and folder in DTP. One can even choose 2 or messages and these will combine into a single RTF.

10

Here is a script to import selected Mail messages as RTF (rich text) into the DTP folders of your choice. It might be worthwhile to show the Comments column in a list view, for the comments are “informative”: they show the sender or first recipient, which is which, and a condensed version of the first part of the message text. For example:

" <: NYTimes.com:–Your subscription is up soon. Please rene"

(incoming message)
“>: Sam:–Hi, Sam! I can’t believe that you won the lotter” (outgoing message)

Notes:

  1. Graphics & HTML are not imported.
  2. If you have selected messages in more than one Message Viewer, the script transfers only those from the Viewer that was opened first.
  3. Graphics may occasionally prevent some text from appearing. In that case, click on the entry URL to get the missing text from the original message.
  4. The date the message was sent is assigned to DTP’s Date Created.

The script has been tested in OS X 10.58 and Mail 3.6.
.
-Steve
Pipe_Mail_to_DEVONthinkPro.scpt.zip (12.6 KB)