I’m moving from Outlook on Windows to Entourage on the Mac. I currently have 9 years of emails archived into about 100 .PST files. I can convert these to MBOX files easily, and/or put them in Entourage a bit at a time if needed, in order to export to EagleFiler.
Right now, I have them all indexed on Windows with a program called X1. I have instant search capability across all of those 100 PST files for any particular email, with attachements.
My real question is, can EagleFiler handle that many records and content including attachments? If I had to guess, it would be about 300,000 emails, many with attachments.
OK, excellent, I didn’t really want to import each one into Entourage anyway.
When I import, is there a specific way I want to do it in order for Spotlight to find items within these emails? Or do I not want to do that and keep it separate? My only issue with separate is that many times will would need to search in Spotlight, and if I dont find an old email there, I would then need to search in EF. I’m obviously confused on this because I may have read back too far in your forum and might be looking at responses for older versions of EF.
I have been reading the forum for a few hours and I’m trying to find out the recommended way to handle this on the Mac. With X1 on my Windows box, it indexes all of the 100 .PST files along with all email in my folders within Outlook, so they are all part of the same search results. I would really like that kind of capability. As well, since I will be hooked into Exchange, I will need to empty my Inbox and Sent folders every month, or I go over the corporate space limit. So in my current process, I’m continually adding to the number of PST files (which instead would be MBOX files).
EagleFiler stores mail in its original format. So, for example, if you import a mbox file (a whole mailbox of messages stored in one file) it will remain an mbox file. If you import a .eml file (a single message stored as a file) it will remain a .eml file. EagleFiler can view and search messages that are stored both ways. When browsing a mbox file in EagleFiler, you can drag messages out of the mailbox (and into a folder in EagleFiler) to convert them to individual .eml files.
EagleFiler is much more efficient dealing with mbox files. I would not put 300,000 messages in the same EagleFiler library using .eml files; it would work, but it would be quite slow. (This number of messages would also overwhelm Entourage or Apple Mail.) However, in mbox format it should be pretty speedy in EagleFiler. Mbox files are also more efficient for the Mac filesystem, for backups, etc. The downside is that Spotlight does not know how to index mbox files; it is designed around the idea of one-file-indexable-item.