Indexing Apple Mail

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1

I see that I can import messages from Apple Mail, but is there anyway to index messages? I have a little over 700MB of mail (no attachments, just text). Rather than having that duplicated in the DTP database, I’d like to just have it indexed. Is that possible?

Thanks

2

Another interesting question. :slight_smile:

Apple’s Mail app isn’t all that old, but Apple developers have changed their minds several times so far in how to implement it.

If memory serves, at one time Mail messages were in a single “soup” database. Currently, they are individual files with the “.emlx” file name suffix.

So we have a chicken and eggs situation. If DT Pro could “read” .emlx files, you could index them.

But those message files are currently in the “unknown” category. I have no idea what it would take in development to make the files indexable to your database.

3

Thanks for the reply. The emlx files are just plain text files. They have a little xml block at the bottom for Spotlight (I presume). Other than that, they are just raw plain text files.

Since DTP can index plain text files, I thought there may be a way to tell it to treat emlx files as text.

Thanks

4

Although this is a possibility, it wouldn’t be useful without a MIME parser. Attachments or encrypted emails would bloat the database, searching would be unreliable and support for international characters would be completely missing.