newbie questions

Hi,

I am on day 1 on my EagleFiler trial. I have some questions/comments to which I was unable to find the answers in the manual:

  1. To test, I have imported all of my old e-mail (MH converted to mbox using archivemail. EagleFiler successfully imported my folder hierarchy etc. But it appears that I am unable to search for anything (Anywhere, From, To/cc) unless I am in a particular mail folder. Is it not possible to do global searches?
  2. When I click on a mbox folder, the preview pane (not sure if this is the right term - the bottom right pane) just shows the name of the mailbox and the number of messages in the mailbox. This seems like a waste of space - wouldn’t it be better to have a list of message headers, or the tags used for messages in that mbox, or something else?
  3. I don’t use Apple Mail (I use mutt). So I was a bit perturbed when I clicked on an attachment and got the “Welcome to Mail” account setup screen. Is it possible to just open attachments using the Finder?
  4. Is it possible to adjust the timeout parameters for grabbing web archives? I dragged a URL to EagleFiler and one of the servers providing an image in the page (a doubleclick server) was down at the time. Importing the web archive did not complete until EagleFiler timed out, which appeared to be after several minutes. Alternatively is it possible to specify any kind of ad-blocking? Also on this point, the timeout didn’t appear in the “Errors” window; i.e., there was no feedback at all.
  5. Has anyone written a capture script for Preview? When I pressed the capture key with a PDF open in Preview I expected it to be imported into EagleFiler, but this didn’t occur.

That’s it for now; no doubt I will have more questions as I start to explore further. TIA.

At present, in order to search mail messages you need to have the mailbox selected. You can select multiple mailboxes and/or the library to search them all at once.

I agree that that would be nice.

Not yet–sorry.

No, but I will look into that.

Unfortunately, Preview is not scriptable.

Thanks for the ridiculously quick reply! Yes, I am able to search multiple mailboxes by selecting them. But if I just select the Library the search doesn’t work. Similarly if I just select my “mail” folder (under Library) the search doesn’t work. Am I misunderstanding what you are saying?

If I do Select All in the Source pane before searching, that seems to work. But as a new user, I would have assumed that this (global search) would be the default.

Yes. The search is like in iTunes; it filters down the list that you’re looking at to show just the items that match the query. So in order to search mail messages, you must be looking at them. The Library source doesn’t show messages, which is why you need to select one or more mailboxes if you want to search messages.

It’s possible that this will change at some point, but the reason it works the way it does is that it would consume a lot of time and RAM to load all the messsages when you click on Library, and in most cases it would be overwhelming to see them all in the list (mixed in with your files), anyway.

I see. I was confused because you said “and/or the library” in your first reply.

It’s possible that this will change at some point, but the reason it works the way it does is that it would consume a lot of time and RAM to load all the messsages when you click on Library, and in most cases it would be overwhelming to see them all in the list (mixed in with your files), anyway.

Fair enough. Thanks again for the quick replies. Off to play with your program a bit more…

It turns out that this isn’t the case. A quick web search brought me to this page, which says that if you run the following, you can enable some basic applescripting in preview:

defaults write /Applications/Preview.app/Contents/Info NSAppleScriptEnabled -bool YES

After restarting Preview, then the following Capture Script seems to work for me:


on capture()
    tell application "Preview"
        try
            set thePath to path of document 1
            return {{|path|:thePath}}
        on error
            return {}
        end try
    end tell
end capture

It probably needs some error-checking to see if the file currently open in Preview is supported by EagleFiler (or should EagleFiler check this?). Anyway, thought I would post this to the forum in case anyone else is interested.

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks. I assume that the reason Apple didn’t mark Preview as scriptable in the Info.plist is that the scriptability is buggy and/or not tested. That said, I don’t expect that it would fail in a nasty way, and the modification is probably safe for this purpose. I think it makes more sense to have the script send EagleFiler all the files and let it see whether it knows how to import them.

EagleFiler 1.4 includes a built-in capture script for Preview and instructions for how to make Preview scriptable.