I have a large archive of badly organized old emails going back about 20 years. My objective is to get everything in one place so I can get it all properly organized, weed out anything unneeded and make what remains more easily searchable.
Some of the exported mboxes are dupes so go through quickly on crosscheck with what’s already in there. Half a dozen times, though, the app has frozen on me (beachball) after hours of processing a folder. I, then, open it back up, delete that folder and start over and hope it works this time. So far, everything has eventually be imported.
I’ve been importing a specific mail account now for almost five hours. Simultaneously to these hundreds of subfolders importing, the Activity pane tells me that the files are being indexed. When I began this message, it said that would take 172 hours. It now says 193 hours. It says just one of the folders being imported will take 19 hours (increasing) for about 27,000 messages.
I realize I’m trying to import an awful lot of files, but is this normal? Would I be able to speed up the imports if I turned off the indexing until everything was already in there? Is this the software for my use case?
Could you describe a bit about how you are importing the old e-mails? Were they already saved as mailbox files on disk and you imported them into EagleFiler? Or were you importing directly from a mail client?
Normally, if you import a lot of stuff all at once, EagleFiler will focus on the importing first and do indexing in the background. However, if you do multiple separate batches of importing, if it’s already busy with other imports and indexing it may put the newer imports on hold until the previous work is done. In such situations, you can click the × button in the Activity window to stop the indexing so that it focuses on importing. It will eventually restarting the indexing automatically later. Or if you know that you will be doing a lot of imports and want to prioritize that, you can temporarily entirely disable indexing for all files by clicking here; to re-enable it, click here.
People have very different idea of what “large” is. You mentioned hundreds of folders. Do you have a rough idea of the total number of files/folders/GB? EagleFiler can handle pretty much any amount of mail, but knowing the scale will help inform my estimates of how long things should take.
The time estimates that you’re quoting sound way too high, unless you’re using a slow Mac with a spinning hard drive. I would expect 27K messages to take a few minutes, not many hours. It’s also the case that things will take longer and the estimates can get way off if there are many operations running at once.
If you think the app is freezing, please record a sample, and we can see what’s causing that and whether it’s actually stuck. There are also some general speed tips here.
Yes, they are mostly saved in folders from the ~/Library/Mail folders on old Macs, most of which I no longer have access to. I, also, exported some specific mboxes from my current Mail installation on this machine and that went through without incident. These old ones, though, I’ve been dragging and dropping, individually. I, first, tried dropping them all in but had the app crash at about the 7th folder. There are 15 of these old mail folders [V4, V5, etc.] and some seem to be dupes or partial dupes.
OK, great. I’ll try just stopping the Indexing for now and see if that speeds it up.
The folder containing all the mail folders is 14.51GB.
Indexing has been stuck on whatever item 8 of 483 is and the time estimate is now up to 325hrs.
Thanks for getting back to me. I’ll check out the links.
Thanks for the sample. This does seem to be a hang, which I haven’t seen before, where it’s actually stuck importing. It may help to click here to tell EagleFiler to import fewer files at once.