Trouble Importing Emails from Apple Mail into DT4

DEVONthink
,
1

Hi DT Community,

Is anyone else having issues importing emails from Apple Mail into DT4? When I open the Import window, all my inboxes appear correctly, but as soon as I select any specific inbox — whether small or large — the loading wheel just keeps spinning indefinitely.

Has anyone found a fix or workaround for this?

Thanks in advance!

Julien

2

Welcome @docjulien

  • What version of DEVONthink and OS are you running?
  • How many mailboxes and what range of the number of emails, e.g., 100 to 25,000?
3

Did you reboot?

4

Thank you @BLUEFROG

- Versions: DEVONthink: 4.1.1 and macOS: 26.2

  • 5 mailboxes, from 8 messages to 33,500 messages
5

Thank you @pvonk, I did reboot. No improvements.

6

And even the small one with only 8 messages doesn’t work?

7

The one with 8 messages took 1 minute to display the messages, the one with 140 messages took about 5 minutes. So it works but it is surprisingly slow, I’m running a macpro M1 max with 32GB RAM.

8

Are these local mailboxes?

9

They are all Gmail accounts. I assume they are all on the server, but I thought Apple Mail would bring them all locally to my Mac compared to Spark that keep everything on servers. Isn’t that the case?

10

Is caching of messages and attachments in the settings for this account, see Mail > Settings > Accounts, enabled?

11

No caching option in Mail > Settings > Accounts nor in Mail > Settings.

Separately, I was using SpamSieve, an Apple Mail extension. I uninstalled it and it speed up the process for the small mailboxes.

12

I am in the process of using DT4 to archive a truly embarrassingly large email account about to hit the 100 Gb Outlook 365 limit (about 1 million emails).

I am doing this by individual folders and just archived an 8 Gb folder this weekend successfuly into a new database in DT4.

Interestingly my Intel Mac Pro with tons of RAM was unable to accept the import; it kept freezing.

But my newer M2 MacBook Pro was able to handle the import fine in about 30 minutes. The database then synced fine to the older Mac Pro which can access/search it with no problems.

So bottom line - the software “works” but you may hit a hardware stumbling block depending on your system specs. Breaking it into smaller mboxes helps quite a bit.

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13

Thank you, @rkaplan

I’m definitely leaning toward your conclusion as well.

14

See the Troubleshooting > Email Import Issues section of the built-in Help and manual for information on using the On My Mac mailboxes.

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