Re-importing some email messages

While browsing a mailbox I had imported a long time ago, I realized some messages should in fact belong to another mailbox. I double-clicked on them, so they opened in Mail.app, and I erased (well, to be more precise, hid) them from the EF mailbox.

My problem is when I tried to import them again: keeping the Mail.app message in the front, I tried the capture key, but I got a message saying I should have the Mail main window in the front instead. How can I import these messages back in EF (and then merge them in the correct mailbox)?

It sounds like you tried to capture the individual message windows that you’d opened from EagleFiler. This won’t work for two reasons. First, due to the way Mail works, EagleFiler is limited to capturing from Mail’s main viewer windows. Second, the messages in question aren’t stored in Mail’s mailboxes; they’re just temporary files that EagleFiler saved.

Instead, to “move” messages to a different EagleFiler mailbox, you can export them to the Finder, import the file, and then delete the messages from the original mailbox. (If you want them to be part of a pre-existing mailbox, you could then merge it with the newly imported mailbox.)

Thanks a lot, it worked.

While trying to find again these messages (out of a 5000 mails mailbox), I found it difficult to get them. I did notice that:

  • I could not find a visual clue a record was deleted, and not way to only see deleted records
  • searching using quotes did yet exact phrase match (which is great), but searching the “Title” of emails does not seem to work in this case (i.e. if I have an email whose subject is Invitation, I’ll find it with Invitation (search title), “Invitation” (search anywhere, but this word occurs only in the subject), but not with “Invitation” (search title)). Is this a (known) bug?

EagleFiler will show ⌫ in the Tags column for deleted messages. This isn’t documented, but you can see only deleted records by turning on View > Show > Deleted Messages and doing a tag search for “deleted” (without the quotes).

It is by design that the fancy search syntax like quotation marks only applies to Anywhere and Notes searches. The other types of searches match exactly what you type. So if you type a quotation mark for a Title search, it will find titles that contain a quotation mark.

Ah, thanks for the deleted hint.

About the search syntax, it now makes sense, but I interpreted “Anywhere” as in “any search”, not the exact anywhere. (I did not go look to the help page when doing the search, it’s how I remembered it.) Sorry for the confusion.