Mail & email with attachments

I am interested in EagleFiler as a way of taking the weight off my Mail app. (OS X 10.4.8)
Have just experimentally imported a Mail mbox into Eagle Filer. Complete success and seems nice and intuitive. It even smoothly handled and displayed mails in non-Latin characters (about 10% of my mail is in Russian).
But what about mail attachments? I can see no references anywhere to mail attachments in the handbook or this forum but these certainly seem not to have been copied over in the process.
As my plan is to delete mail from Mail once it is safely in EagleFiler, I would definitely want to be able to find a way back to mail attachments from the email copied into EagleFiler.
Is this possible? (It’s a show-stopper for me if it isn’t [glum])

EagleFiler preserves all of the attachments. They’re stored in the mailbox file along with the rest of the message data. The number of attachments (or other message parts) will be shown in the # column in the records list. Additionally, when you view a message with attachments it will show the names of the attachments along with the To/From/Subject. Click the paperclip icon in the message viewer to access the attachments via Apple Mail.

Have only just now looked for a reply. Thank you very much.

It turns out that when I was playing with eagle filer, I randomly chose a message with attachment and did click on the paperclip and a window did open. The window header contained a white generic icon .xml and the contents of the window was header information and what looked liked the usual jpeg alphanumeric gobbledygook.

I have now gone back to the original mail and the jpeg attachment opens normally. Message was sent from a yahoo.de account.

So obviously my random selection just happened to fall on a message that got corrupted during the import into EagleFiler. (A worry nonetheless)

I have now come across another problem: messages encrypted with PGP, display this in the view panel:

This message could not be displayed because of an error: list index out of range

What do I do about that? Much of my business correspondence is made private using PGP. EagleFiler clearly does not like PGPed messages.

My guess is that the message with the attachment was correctly imported by EagleFiler but that something went wrong when EagleFiler exported it in order to view the attachment. I’ve already fixed a bug in that code since version 1.0.2. I’ve also fixed a few bugs having to do with mail display, which might explain the problems you had with PGP messages.

It would be helpful if you could e-mail me at eaglefiler@c-command.com and send the EagleFiler mailbox files containing the messages in question. I’ll make sure EagleFiler works correctly on them and send you a pre-release version that fixes these problems.

Will post you an Eagle Filer folder with samples.

I think the problem, if there is one at all, is quite minor.

The message display problems are addressed in EagleFiler 1.1.

What about deleted messages?
Hi,

Earlier, Michael said this about Mail.app attachments:

I have a follow-up question. If I import a mailbox into EagleFiler and then delete that mailbox in Mail.app, what happens to attachments in that scenario? Above, you indicate that when you click on the paperclip icon, the original message opens up in Mail.app and you can use Mail.app to access the attachment, but what happens when the original message has been deleted in Mail.app?

Thanks in advance!

Ken

It still shows up. Just like normal.

When you click the paperclip, EagleFiler reads the message from its mailbox, saves it as a temporary file, and asks Mail to open it. So this will continue to work even if you delete the original message from Mail.

Excellent!

Excellent, thanks!

This was a situation where I didn’t want to “try it” to see what happens due to issues of potential data loss.

This is an excellent approach to the problem. Thank you.

Ken

I don’t use Apple Mail and don’t have it configured. After moving thousands of messages from Mailsmith to EagleFiler, what are my options for opening attachments or saving attachments to disk?

Dave Burbank

At present, EagleFiler only supports viewing/saving attachments using Apple Mail. You may have to enter some dummy account information in order to launch Mail, but after that it won’t care that you aren’t using it and will happy open e-mails with attachments when EagleFiler asks it to.

Of courses, since EagleFiler stores the mail in mbox format, it’s also possible to import whole mailboxes back into your mail program of choice and access the attachments that way. But using Mail is easier, I think.

As always, I am very impressed with your support. Jeepers! You answered that in 13 minutes!!

As a satisfied user of SpamSieve and DropDMG I look forward to my new relationship with EagleFiler.

Dave Burbank