I’ve struggled with this as well. My office computer is windows but at home I use an iPad and a MacBook Air. I’m pretty much stuck with Outlook on both my MacBook and office computers and saving into subfiles in outlook is tedious. What I’m trying now is dragging all my emails into a folder for a particular matter and then just deleting those same emails from outlook. I used to convert to PDF but its too time intensive. The folders I transfer emails to are on my office network and are backed up.
The iOS app allows you to put the pdf button on the menu, so while it is manual it shows up beside reply/forward etc and then jus click DTTG to import it to DEVONthink. Faster than copying the email with iOS mail app in my opinion.
After trying things out and looking at the beta ios16 mail, Spark mail is still my choice, and im not sure that I want to have a second instance of mail.app on my iOS/Mac just to import EML. The see email->pdf button->DTTG is quick on iOS. Me waiting to get to Mac or opening mail.app just for eml probably won’t happen.
I am a well known DEVONthink 3 fan. It is a heavyweight app., it is also a very lightweight app., if I can put it that way: It is not expensive and worth its price for what you are doing alone. You would, I guarantee find further uses for it if you got it.
As it happens I use HoudahSpot to search it as well as its own search functions. I rely on search now rather than filing systems so to speak. HoudahSpot, provided the native Mail app is actually open, will search Mail well in my experience.
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Mail Archive Update:
After my DEVONThink debacle I’ve been trying to come up with a way to convert my 84K individual emails that are in a DEVONThink Database into something else. Current incarnation is that I had each years worth of archived messages in a single DEVONhink Folder. I opened that folder up in DT, selected all the messages and did an export into UNIX mailbox. Then I saved those files in an Email Archive folder on my hard drive. I use Thunderbird as my searching tool. It does not have any attachment to my real email and is only used to view the existing archive .mbox files.
This is working remarkably well for me, those times I need to find old messages I can fire Thunderbird up, use it to search or go directly to the message I need and then shut it down.
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This seems to be a great method. I assume Thunderbird requires you to link to an email account. Do you just link an email account that you don’t actively use?
Nope, that’s th beauty of it. I can use Thiunderbird witout ANY links to any email account I have.
Remember, I use POP email so my mail is downloaded to my local machine. Which is why this works well.
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I just started using EagleFiler and the developer and forum/community are responsive and helpful.
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It sounds like you have it saved as an .mbox? And you’re using Thunderbird to open up the mbox?
Correct I use Thunderbird to read the .mbox file
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There is a way to use JXA to export Message(s) directly from Mail by script. Make sure the “Export as PDF…” is typed exactly like in the script.
‘use strict’;
var SysEvents = Application(‘System Events’);
var mail = SysEvents.processes.byName(‘Mail’);
mail.frontmost = true;
var fileMenu = mail.menuBars[0].menus.byName(‘File’);
fileMenu.click();
delay(.2);
fileMenu.menuItems.byName(‘Export as PDF…’).click();
@rmattson2011 Thanks!
This can also be scripted in AppleScript and via Keyboard Maestro as well.
I found it to be someone flakey, however. What I was doing was waiting for the export dialog box to come up, then replacing the name of the exported file, and then executing the save. I found that timing issues prevented it from being reliable.
Wondering if there is a way by script to drag and drop messages in Mail to Finder? Maybe with KM or a UI script . . .
I don’t know how to use a script to drag and drop an e-mail to a Finder folder, but there are Save As and Export To PDF commands on the FILE menu in Apple Mail which could be called from a Keyboard Maestro macro.
My EagleFiler app lets me hit the F1 key to capture a selected e-mail into EagleFiler’s folder as a native .eml formatted file.
@karlnyhus The reason that print to pdf is useful for emails vs saving the .eml file is when there are embedded links in the email, eg when it is an email in HTML format with links. If you save as an .eml file, then down the line you might find the links are no longer active/current and so the email will not display that data.
Ideally I would like an easy and reliable mechanism to save an email as a pdf so that all of the linked data is there, as a .eml file to preserve the original email itself unchanged with all of the embedded metadata, and extract all of the attachments into separate files for convenience. I did write a rather complex script and KM macro that did all of this, but the crucial part of saving to a PDF reliably just wasn’t … reliable.
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I am trying to automate a similar workflow using just JXA and no third party software. I want to have a script that runs on a timer (eg once a day) that archives out older emails in multiple formats: pdf, .eml, and .mbox. I figure if the process is automated why not have multiple formats to give options down the road, if needed. I will post if I figure something out.
If nothing has changed in the past few years, each folder in Thunderbird mail is an mbox file. So I used to keep TB running in the background so my backups were constantly “archiving” my mail. Should disaster hit all I had to do was recover the latest “All Mail” .mbox and import it into Mail.app or whatever client I was using.
Would using TB be an easy way to start your process?
Thanks WayneG that is something to look at. I am going to read up on Thunderbird Mail.
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WayneG good call on the Thunderbird!!! Archiving to file system is built in. You can even archive attachments directly to the file system outside of the App. Love it.
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Thanks all, this discussion was very illuminating. I too have arrived at the conclusion that TB is the way to go for email archiving, although I have not tried all the solutions mentioned here.
One thing I’d like to note is that I recently found a python script that will automatically export .eml files, with embedded attachments, from any Apple Mail mailbox. You simply point it at ~/Library/Mail/V10/active-mailbox-of-choice and give it a save directory. Super easy to import to TB from there.
Hope this helps.
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