I’m trying to manage my email using DTPO and am not finding the workflow very helpful. I wondered if anyone has and tips or advice on how they manage it?
My current problem is importing the email. Dragging in the emails has been my preferred option, but I have since discovered that some attachements corrupt themselves using this method (I have submitted a ticket and am awaiting a response). This leaves me with the mail import facility. Archiving the whole google apps mailbox was fine, it is the subsequent importing that’s a pain. I cannot import from my “All Mail”, folder as this contains 12000 emails and takes ages to load every time. This means that for every account I have to click on “inbox”, “sent messages” separately and import. The problem then is that it creates another “inbox”, “sent messages” folder each time and you have to guess which email in the box belongs to which account.
There also a problem that it does not seem to find the sent email in the sent folder properly each time.
There has to be a better way. I don’t really care how I get the email in, I just want to be able to use DTPO’s power to search the emails.
Does it work better with Outlook or another mail client? I’m using apple mail.
DTPO does seem somewhat flakey with emails. Some won’t get imported with a, “Couldn’t extract text from mail message” in the activity window. This doesn’t help as date of email is not given so you only have the subject to work by and if you have a number of messages with the same title spanning a number of years, you’re snookered.
At this point I would not trust DTPO to be my sole repository for email. I’m glad I have Mailsteward installed. It allows me to find emails that are corrupted in DTPO or have an import error. However, finding stuff that is imported into DTPO is so good especially with smart folders that I want it to be my sole repository!
As you have DEVONthink Pro Office, why not use the Mail plugin in that application more consistently?
If you use the File > Import > Email routine, an archive will be created that will consistently update your capture each time you run it.
You can (also, or alternatively if you wish) use the menu commands in Mail to capture selected messages or mailboxes to other locations in your databases. For example, I may capture an individual message to a project group, or to a collection of messages and correspondence from a friend.
Note that if you capture a message, it will not be recaptured to another location (the archive, or a mailbox) unless you check Preferences > Email’s option, “Previously imported will become replicants”. (This applies to captures within the same database.)
The Creation Date of messages should be the same as the Sent date.
If your computer is stable, attachments included in email messages should NOT be damaged in any way. I’ve never had that happen.
The Mail plugin just dumps the emails in the global inbox which then requires me to shift them again and is therefore not much use to me.
My computer is as stable as apple’s os (more unstable with each new release!). However, I have discovered recently when going back to an email in the database that an attachement is 0 bytes and won’t open. I have submitted a ticket and am still waiting to hear back.
I’m now beginning to develop a reasonable workflow. I have a database purely for all my emails. I’ve imported all my emails from my google apps account (11,000 emails) via apple mail. I’ve also imported some from an mbox file and it only imported those not present in the database which was great. I now have some 13,000 emails in the database (3GB).
I’ve managed to create smart group that organise by date (less than and greater than) allowing me to see emails for a particular year. I’ve then created another smart group that just searches the last financial year with keywords such as “amazon”, “google play”, “itunes”, “order”, “invoice”, etc, that filters all my taxable items. This has worked really well. I’ve also found reducing the search to “In Selection” allows me to further reduce my search range as it only searches within the group selected. One thing I really like is that if you create a smart group using “Author” as the search criteria you can essentially get it to only show sent email by filtering your name. The only thing you’ve got to watch is if there is variation in your name. So you might need to use, “Joe Bloggs”, and “Joe” to capture all sent mail. It’s brilliant though as I can capture all email, into one inbox and allow the smart folders to sort! So far i’m really happy with my setup and I’m able to finally search for just about anything.
The only kink in the workflow is getting the emails into DTPO. The easiest option at the moment is the import email option. However, you have to remember to select the group you want it to import the emails into first, or it copies them into your current location. The other issue is that once the mail import dialogue appears you have to click through your IMAP folders and import from the locations you need. In my case “Inbox” and “Sent Items”. This is ok for one account, but for multiple accounts becomes a bit of a pain. Finally, I have decided to leave my original emails in google apps mail as I have plenty of space. Because I archive emails into the “All Mail” folder I need this folder showing up in the IMAP subscription. This also means it appears in the email import dialogue in DTPO. As there are some 12,000 emails in there it does take some time to load and if you accidentally click the “All Mail” folder you may as well go off and watch a tv programme for 30 minutes.
I would really appreciate a better conduit to importing email, preferably one that was automated, as I need the emails copied in on a daily basis. In fact if DTPO could be my email client that would be perfect. I use Omnifocus so any actionable email that requires longer than 2 minutes is linked from the DTPO database to the Omnifocus task so I can just click on the link in Omnifocus and it opens the message. This is really great. I therefore do not need a separate email client if DTPO did that job.
You can set the destination to which new content is sent to databases in Preferences > Import - Destination. The default is the Global Inbox, but two other options exist. I use “Select group” most of the time.
I have some automated scripts running that file things into the global inbox, so this wouldn’t work for me. I assume it’s not possible to change the destination of the email import using the menu in the mail app?