Hey everyone,
Over the last month I’ve been building a Python tool that links emails and their extracted attachments in DEVONthink so the relationships show up in the Graph view. The core idea is simple: all emails sharing the same normalized subject are grouped into a single “Thread group", and the script creates links so both the email and its attachments point to that thread
Email → Thread group – Attachment
In many cases (though not all), the Graph view doesn’t reflect these links as expected. I’ve attached screenshots showing what I see. Could someone confirm whether I’m using the Graph feature incorrectly, or if this might be a bug?
As I think this tool might be useful to others, I’ll be publishing the source code here soon. Thanks in advance for any insight
So there should be one graph which connects the three testemail → testsubjectgroup ← testattachment, instead if I click on each of them a different graph with different omissions and glitches appears:
Also this mess:
Welcome @ConstantinJHuber
It appears you’re using item links but more information would be helpful, including not cropping screen captures of the inspector.
Also, item linking to groups is a bit of an unanticipated behavior and it may indeed have a bug.
Development would have to assess this.
How exactly did you extract & link them? DEVONthink’s support for externally edited emails is limited (as emails are usually not editable) and therefore item links in emails are not recognized.
Thanks for the clarification! Here’s how I handle it without editing the .eml files:
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I don’t touch the .eml content. Emails stay intact with their original, embedded attachments.
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I extract attachments as separate records and use DEVONthink item links stored in metadata to connect everything.
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I create a “thread” group per normalized subject (one group per conversation).
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Link directions:
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The thread group stores links to its member emails. (Correction to my earlier wording.)
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Each extracted attachment links back to every thread it appears in, so a single attachment can be referenced by multiple threads.
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This avoids duplicating attachments across replies (since many emails resend the same files) while still showing their relationship to each conversation.
So, no links are embedded inside the emails themselves. Everything lives in DEVONthink metadata, which is what the Graph should visualize.
Hi Bluefrog, thanks for your quick reply.
Yeah I probably should have added that in the Graph view I’ve selected only show item links.
So what I’m doing is creating three custom metadata fields. One is “threadlinks”, the other one is “inthread” and the third one “memberemails”
testsubjectgroup (multiline field “memberemails” contains link to testemail and link to testemail2)
-testemail (single-line field “inthread” contains link to testsubjectgroup)
-testemail2 (single-line field “inthread” contains link to testsubjectgroup)
attachments
-testattachment (multiline field “threadlinks” contains link to testsubjectgroup)
Does the Document > Links inspector show the expected incoming/outgoing links?
Yes they show what is expected.
Thanks for the information! I was able to reproduce the issues and the next release will fix them,
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