EagleFiler v DevonThink for archiving email?

[contrawise]

I've seen lots of comments that folks use EagleFiler to archive their email. I've never heard that about DEVONthink. I already own DEVONthink, though. Is there anything that makes EagleFiler better for email archiving? Any wisdom about differences, pluses, minuses, would be greatly appreciated. I'm about to change email clients, after many years. Planning to move from Mailsmith toMailMate or Thunderbird. I'm willing to buy a copy of EagleFiler if it will be significantly better.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Michael Tsai]

EagleFiler developer here, so I'm not the best person to compare the two apps. But, as a former longtime Mailsmith user, I wanted to highlight that EagleFiler supports some of Mailsmith's unique features. For example, you can select a batch of messages in Mailsmith and press the F1 key to import them into EagleFiler. This will import the full message contents and attachments (as with other mail clients), and it will also preserve Mailsmith's status flags (unread, flagged, replied, redirected, etc.) and any colored label that you've set or notes that you've added.

EagleFiler stores e-mails in the standard mbox format, which is efficient (one file per mailbox instead of one per message) and can easily be imported back into any mail client if necessary. It offers quick searching of the message content as well as the contents of any attached files. Files are automatically checksummed for safe long-term archival, so that if a mailbox becomes damaged it can alert you that you should restore it from a backup (before the the damaged file has propagated to the backup). Please feel free to post in the EagleFiler forum or contact me directly if you have any questions.

 

[Dr.Paul]

I can attest that Michael Tsai is one of the most responsible developers in the entire Applesphere, and EagleFiler is an excellent app.

 

[contrawise]

Michael - Many thanks for your very helpful reply!

Out of curiosity, does it handle "unique features" of T-bird or Mailmate equally well?

Roger

 

[Michael Tsai]

Thunderbird isn’t AppleScriptable, so for that EagleFiler just imports the raw message data. It won’t preserve the unread status, etc.

For MailMate there is an experimental script to preserve the MailMate-specific tags. MailMate itself has some limitations with exporting this data (e.g. when there are spaces).

And EagleFiler has built-in support for preserving the metadata when importing from Apple Mail, including MailTags if you have that installed.

 

[Michael Tsai]

For MailMate there is an experimental script to preserve the MailMate-specific tags. MailMate itself has some limitations with exporting this data (e.g. when there are spaces).

This feature is now in the official MailMate bundle for EagleFiler.