Hello - I have been away from EF for a few years, finally sitting down to backup a ton of emails from Mail.app.
Running into an issue - from Mail.app, i can select text within an email and EF imports that.
If however I select an email or multiple emails, EF switches from Mail.app to EF as foreground app, but no additions are made in the Records pane of EF - neither individual emails nor a mailbox folder.
From the above, it seems that both Full Disk Access and Automation are both working (as is the Keyboard/Services/Text shortcut) - but I can’t capture an entire email (or mailbox)?
In the Finder, I see some empty folders such as “To Import (eflibrary-name)” and “Temporary Items.nobackup” - that were created today.
I tried to import both non-gmail as well as gmail emails, as also some “On My Mac” locally-stored emails. No luck with any.
I tried a few tricks like creating a sub-folder in EF to import into, without luck. Can you advise what I could do?
A follow-up question before I delete these emails from Mail.app - the Mailbox containing 4,000+ individual emails are saved in EF now. The emails which contained attachments are size-wise proportionately larger than those which didn’t, so I’m assuming the attachment data is within the individual (eml?) email files.
When I click on an attachment, the email and attachment open up in Mail.app. Just want to confirm that Mail.app is performing simply as a viewer/front-end/helper app here; ie., the opened email is not being imported/stored/saved inside Mail.app just by the action of clicking on it in EF?
Is there some way of importing the eml file into EF so the attachment is extracted and then saved separately in a folder, yet linked to the email (in that clicking on the attachment icon in the email allows the user to preview the attachment, either within EF, or via a handler app like Preview)?
Page 52 in the user guide implies that 1. The email is not being stored in Mail.app by being opened, and 2. That attachments can be extracted by clicking on them in EF, so that EF hands the opening of the email to Mail.app (or similar), and the attachment can be extracted that way. If this is the advised procedure, I can follow it; but I am just trying to save a few steps if possible.
Yes, with both mbox and .eml files, the attachment data is stored within the file along with the rest of the message data. It’s the original data, as received from the mail server.
Correct. (If you want to copy the message back into Mail, you can do that from its Message menu.)
Not to drag a bunch of people down this rabbit hole - but I discovered that for some reason, all the emails in my Mail.app have some issue with their attachments, in that although the file sizes of emails with attachments are suitably big, Mail.app is unable to render any of these attachments.
Fortunately I had a set of the original files received from google (they’re in some html form, with an index.html file and an accompanying folder containing .eml files) - if i drag/drop the eml files directly into EF, I’m able to see the attachments just fine when previewed in Mail. So I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do. Looks like I’ll lose subfolder data with this method, but that’s a small price to pay.
So as one can imagine, I’ve done a few dozen tests and figured out a few ways to get emails into EF. Hit me up if anyone has questions of their own!
Definitely they were messed up in/by Mail, but not sure how and why. It’s just the bunch that I had imported into Mail.app last year which are misbehaving (sorry but it’s too long back to remember whether I had hard-imported these locally, or whether I connected with the google server to download them).
In Mail, the messages are intact and the ones with attachments are reporting large sizes - but clicking any of those attachments makes the app try to download the messages. Connection to that server account is no longer possible, so the process is halted.
That’s the other reason I can’t re-export these batches of messages from the Google account. All these accounts were closed over a year ago during a change-of-ownership procedure.
I basically have a bunch of .eml files, which i can directly access both message and attachment. Fortunately I don’t need the existing sub-folder structure, I can rebuild it all with the raw emails. So will pour them all into EF, and re-folderize them there.
