Attachment missing error / how to manage updating mailboxes in EF?

[domellen]

Recently, my mail provider, which I use with IMAP, had a serious technical problem that blocked everything for two days. So I decided to add a layer of security by putting most of the messages into Eaglefiler.

I have already been doing this once in a while for years but I only imported mailboxes that I wasn’t using anymore but wanted to keep as an archive and remove from Mail.
Now, I’m considering putting all my (many) active mailboxes into Eaglefiler and keeping them in Mail too because searching is easy in Mail with Infoclick. I know it’s possible to search for messages with Eaglefiler but I want to wait a while before deciding to use only EF for searches.

I have two problems
1/ When I import some mailboxes into EF I get a list of errors “Missing Apple Mail Message Attachment”. I have done all that is suggested in the manual and have imported and run the Download Apple Mail Messages script. Some mailboxes still give the same error. I have checked some of them and some did have an attachment that is no longer visible in Mail but others have never had any attachment. The messages are all quite old.

2/ How do I manage new messages that arrive every day and that I want to keep? Some mailboxes that are in Mail are only used rarely, maybe once or twice a month or less, and others very often. I suppose I will want to update EF quite often, maybe once a week, but I really can’t imagine having to go through my many mailboxes each time to see if there are new messages.

Can anyone who has already done this give me some advice?

(Using EF 1.9.8b7 on Monterey 12.4)

[Michael_Tsai]

@domellen

I have checked some of them and some did have an attachment that is no longer visible in Mail but others have never had any attachment. The messages are all quite old.

If you are OK with there being no attachment imported, you can just ignore the error. If you think EagleFiler is incorrect about there being a missing attachment, you could send in a bug report with an export of the message in question from Mail.

@domellen

How do I manage new messages that arrive every day and that I want to keep? Some mailboxes that are in Mail are only used rarely, maybe once or twice a month or less, and others very often. I suppose I will want to update EF quite often, maybe once a week, but I really can’t imagine having to go through my many mailboxes each time to see if there are new messages.

Currently, there isn’t a great way to automatically update mailboxes that have already been imported if you are also keeping the messages in Mail.

There are some tips here. For example, you can use a smart mailbox in Mail to make it easy to find new messages that haven’t been imported into EagleFiler. After importing, you can sort by File and merge each new mailbox with the old one having the same name.

Another option is to set up a Mail rule with this script to import each message as it arrives. These would be saved as .eml files but could be merged into mailboxes later, if desired. If you file your Mail messages via rules, you could have separate rules/scripts so that the .eml files get auto-filed into the corresponding folders in EagleFiler.