exporting individual messages back to mail
Regarding the request to bring messages back into mail- one of the things that prompted me to download and try eaglefiler was this quote from the site
“but cleaning it out doesn’t have to mean lots of time wasted trying to predict which messages you might need in the future. Disk space is plentiful—just archive all your old mail into EagleFiler.”
What I want to do (and did) is move a TON of mail out of Mail and into Eaglefiler. Once moved, I deleted the original messages from Mail. I’m finding a few messages that I want to move back into Mail because I want them accessible with my current mail. I could explain my whole work process and how I use Mail to track things, but it’s kind of irrelevant. I would prefer if I didn’t have to make a final decision about what to keep in Mail before archiving- no doubt there will always be something I wish I hadn’t deleted from Mail that I can find in Eaglefiler.
Right now, I’m thinking of opening all of the messages in Mail and then forwarding them to myself. Is that my only option currently?
EagleFiler stores mailboxes in the standard mbox format, so one option would be to have Mail import a mailbox that’s in EagleFiler’s library. Or, you leave the messages in Mail and, rather than deleting them after importing to EagleFiler, just move them to a separate mailbox so that you know they’re archived.
Eventually I’d like to make it possible to export selected messages in mbox format so that you can choose which messages to bring back into Mail (or another mail program).
Thanks Michael- it would be really sweet if I could drag a selection of messages from Eaglefiler back to a folder or mailbox in Mail.
Regarding your suggestions, the Mailbox in question has over 10,000 messages. I could re-import and save the 25 messages I want to keep before deleting them again. The thought of having to do that each time I find a random message that I’d like accessible in Mail isn’t too appealing. The main reason that I want to use Eaglefiler is to clear out Mail, which is having a serious struggle handling the volume of mail I have accumulated. (since 2000!)
I agree, but it’s out of the question since Mail doesn’t support incoming drags.
Agreed. I was simply suggesting a solution that would work (with 100% fidelity in terms of message headers and attachments) until EagleFiler has more control over exporting messages.
EagleFiler 1.2.1 lets you export the selected messages to mbox format. This lets you combine messages from multiple mailboxes into a single mailbox, as well as export a new copy of a mailbox that doesn’t include the hidden messages.
I’m resurrecting this thread because I just needed to move some messages from one mailbox to another. There were all tagged “mail_to_move”. So I selected them all (in the tag source), chose File -> Export, and imported the resulting file.
I noticed however that tags are not preserved: none of the imported messages had the “mail_to_move” tag, and the ones that had a “replied” tag had also lost it (there was absolutely no tag after import).
Earlier in the thread, it was said:
At some point, I plan to improve the export such that it will generate the .mbox folder for you and so that it will export the tags and notes in MailTags format inside the .emlx files.
Currently, exporting from EagleFiler does not preserve tags or notes. I’m considering making export include an “EagleFiler Metadata.plist” file so that you can export and import without losing the EagleFiler-specific metadata.
No. In fact, mailboxes are immutable, so technically you cannot copy into a mailbox, period. That said, I’m aware that some people do want to re-arrange their messages (beyond what’s possible with tags alone), so I’m working on a way to support this while preserving the advantages of the current design.
Well, my goal was to merge mailboxes after the import. And unless I’m mistaken merging preserve tags.
What I’m trying to do is merge a subset of a mailbox with another one, preserving the tags. I could merge the two (very big) mailboxes together, and hide some of the messages in one, and some of the messages in the other, but it would seem like quite a waste of space.
How do you deal with messages that were archived in the wrong mailbox? Do you retag them by hand after exporting/merging them?
Personally, I don’t archive messages in the wrong mailbox, because I have everything organized in Mail before importing. I suppose the options are to ignore the problem or to export/merge/retag.
I unfortunately cannot ignore the problem (these messages are in the wrong mailbox, and I want to move them to a different library). I could retag by hand but this would take a long time.
Earlier you said:
My current plan to support trimming of mailboxes within EagleFiler is to let you hide individual messages by pressing Delete and then select the remaining ones and choose a command to copy them into a new mailbox, preserving the tags and notes. This should be much easier than going back and forth through Mail. And it’s much better from an implementation point of view than direct mbox editing, because it will be easier to implement undo, and your data will always been in a consistent state on disk.
Is this still your plan? If this is the case I can wait until this is is implemented.
By the way, did you consider using maildir as a mail storage format? It’s “one file per message” approach could have several advantages: simpler ways to move or delete messages, and the possibility to write a Spotlight importer. And following the same idea that one can only add files and folder by using the EagleFiler import tools, that is EF knows each time a message is added or deleted, you could cache the list of messages (subject, from, to, etc…) so that there is no need to parse the files each time.
In any case, thanks a lot for answering my (many) requests, even on a Sunday!
Yes, and I may add support for that for situations where you want freestanding messages or the ability to rearrange messages. But I much prefer the mbox format for the “final” storage because of its compatibility, speed, and efficiency on disk and in memory. It doesn’t make much difference for small mailboxes, but for large mailboxes the differences are huge.