Just downloaded and am testing.
I noticed that importing a mail.app mailbox with the supplied Add mailbox(es) to DEVONthink.scpt script changes the flagged status of the emails in the mailbox.
Is this the normal behaviour? If so, it’s a pretty badly behaved script - I use the flagged status for other purposes in mail and this script has just reset or changed the status of my emails in a mailbox with 1000 messages.
Not happy tester.
Sorry for the troubles but it’s actually intended to mark already imported mails (so that they’re not going to be imported again).
I suggest you respect the user’s flagged email status and don’t just overwrite it and assume you can do that.
Why don’t you add an x-header to the emails or something that’s non-destructive.
I’d be pretty pissed-off if I imported an archive mailbox with flagged messages to suddenly find ALL the messages had become flagged by DT.
In fact, I think the script is so bad that you should pull it off your standard installation immediately or at least WARN users that all the messages will be flagged BEFORE the script runs.
Now that you know, one of the consequences is that previously flagged messages in your mailbox will NOT be imported by the mailbox script. So if you use flags to mark “important” messages they become the ones that are ignored.
I use flags in a very different way. I flag the items in a mailbox that contain attachments. I scan through these once in a while and decide whether or not to save the attachments (which will not be transferred by the script). In some cases I will save the attachments to my database and probably link them to the relevant message. (I didn’t write the script, by the way.)
Then I unflag everything and run a mailbox script. I’ll now delete the contents of the mailbox as I’ve got a much more searchable archive in my DT Pro database (which I back up externally fairly often).
It would be fairly simple to modify the script so that it only transfers flagged items, and unflags them after the transfer. In that way the user would use a flag to designate an ‘important’ message, and others would be ignored. In either case the script avoids duplication of previously captured message in the database.
Your suggestion to mark a header, for example, bears thinking about but would probably drastically slow down the operation of the script.
I’m baffled. First I tried ‘index’ of my emails from ~user/library/mail/ (apple mail 2, os x 10.4.2) but nothing was readable – just a gazillion empty folders with occasional .plist docs.
Then I started to import my mailboxes while searching the forum and during that same time I came across this post – so I immediately cancelled the import process.
The folders that did get imported appear in the same illegible format as the index results – lots of mostly empty folders with plists containing only this or a version thereof:
So, what am I doing wrong?
PS: I COMPLETELY & WHOLEHEARTEDLY CONCUR with Syd – if DT is going to remove what I’ve flagged or interfere with my designations of flagged emails (or color labels or anything else), then the program is worthless to me with regard to indexing/archiving email and that is a MAJOR reason I purchased it – to be able to do that because os x’s index of mail is spotty and unreliable – I don’t want DT to replace my taxonomy of prioritizations – that’s ridiculous and presumptuous and deadly. YOU should definitely change that and until it’s changed, you should post a BIG MAJOR WARNING to users about this fatal flaw. No way it should do it and certainly to do it and not even warn is unconscionable.
DT Pro doesn’t recognize the database format used by Mail (or for that matter by other email applications such as Entourage).
That means that using either Import or Index on the database file to capture the mail messages won’t be useful.
For more than a year DT Pro (beginning with previously scriptable versions of DT Personal) has provided some simple scripts to allow capture of the plain text of email messages. These scripts do not capture formatting, color coding or attachments from the original messages – only their text. Nor do they capture a thread hierarchy directly.
In DT Pro these scripts are automatically installed (and can also be installed by selecting Help > Install Add-ons) and are available in the global Scripts menu when a mail application is frontmost. So, for example, when Mail is the frontmost application one can select one or more individual messages and then select in the global Scripts menu “Add message(s) to DEVONthink” or select one or more mailboxes and choose the script, “Add mailbox(es) to DEVONthink”.
Messages that have been imported are flagged, so that they will not be duplicated next time the script is run.
Many users have used the scripts. To my recollection, syd’s comment about the use of flagging to mark previously imported messages was the first such comment.
We appreciate user comment and will take the comments about flagging under consideration.
DEVONtechnologies is working on enhancements to transfer of email messages for a possible future release.
This email indexer application does a pretty good job. You might want to download the source and take a look at how they’ve implemented the import process…
I have to second the opinions in this thread. I’m right now evaluating DEVONthink Pro and am so close to purchasing it (it’s AI capabilities are awesome, as is it’s speed) but opening my mailbox this morning and finding tons of flagged messages was a major turn off: It took me quite a while to realize that it was even related to DEVONthink Pro and when I did the first thing I did was removing the Import Rule from Apple Mail. A pity, because my DEVONthink Pro database isn’t even half complete without my mails.
The scripts of V1.2.1 won’t flag the mails anymore.
Excellent.