What’s your method of getting emails to DEVONThink?
I also archive. Last year Google “lost” three years of my work emails. I didn’t delete them, they just vanished overnight one day.
Our work uses Gsuite and their technical support said all backups were corrupted.
Since then all my emails get backed up to DEVONthink.
For individual or a few messages: select the email and use the hotkey CMD-CTRL-OPT-M which I have mapped to the menu item “Move Message to DEVONthink” (Or whatever the actual word is).
For an entire account, which I’ve not done many times, I think I just dragged and dropped all the folders into DEVONthink.
Individual messages probably go into my general personal database, usually becuase they are a software licence or a receipt or some other thing I may need to reference.
If it’s an entire account I’m archiving because I’m losing access, it goes into its own database becuase I don’t need it cluttering up my personal database.
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Jonathan - very sorry for not replying sooner. I tend to use the keyboard combination of CMD-CTRL-OPT-M after I have replied. I then delete the email and my reply straightaway from the mail app. If I ever subsequently need to forward or reply again to an email that is now in DevonThink and gone from my email account, I simply double click on the DEVONthink edit button for the item, and as if by magic it reopens in the email client. I tend to leave emails in my email client until I have replied, but if you prefer you can put the mail into DEVONthink immediately and use the option to get a URL for the unanswered email that you can paste into your task manager of choice. The other thing I do is to rename all emails and other DEVONthink filed documents using @MacSparky file naming technique, i.e “yyy-mm-dd-sender->recipient-re-subject”. Then when is sort the folder by name, you see all the emails, documents, PDFs, spreadsheets etc in chronological order and not separated as is usual with emails. This was transformative for me. I hope that it helps you too.
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@Scottisloud great idea of having entire accounts in separate databases. Right now I’m deleting old emails that I don’t need to condense stuff down. At 60k emails from 110k. Been chipping away at that little by little. Not sure if I can add emails from Spark to DevonThink for an account I don’t have access to anymore. I just haven’t deleted the accounts from Spark yet.
@stuckagain thanks for replying, obvious I’m slow to replying too. I like keyboard combo. If I’m reading this correctly once you reply to emails you delete them? Why? Is it to be extreme in cutting down on clutter? That’s a great file renaming scheme, I’ll use that too. I’d imagine that’s a text expander snippet?
The file naming scheme is actually something I learned from @MacSparky. The TE snippet for the start of the date/file name is “%Y-%m-%d”. As to deleting, aside from the space taken up by duplicated copies, it is the way I know whether I have filed correspondence into DEVONthink. If it is in email, it is not yet in DEVONthink. If I ever want to resend, forward or reply to an email (that is no longer in the email client because I filed it in DEVONthink and deleted it) I simply find it in DEVONthink and click the edit button, which copies it straight back into the Apple mail app as if it was there all the time.
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I’ll maybe Archive this post in DTOP…lol