archiving mail through the Library

Because I’ve been using gmail, it’s been ages since I archived mail through Eaglefiler. Since I’ve got thousands of messages, the easiest way seems to be to do it through the Library. (I’d like to have an on-computer archive and not just rely on the gmail archive.)

The manual says that folders and mailboxes can be dragged in–but I want to make sure I understand which folders. Should I drag the "IMAP-myaddress@imag.gmail.com" folder into Eaglefiler — or the “[Gmail].mbox” mailbox? (Actually I just tried the former, but am wondering if that was a missstep. It seems to be dragging in some odd folders, with alphanumeric names, for example.)

Either should work. It’s possible that you might have other top-level mailboxes besides ”[Gmail].mbox”. Could you post a screenshot showing one of the problem folders and its contents?

Here are the odd files:

Screen Shot 2013-02-03 at 12.10.30 PM.png

And it seems to have resulted in a few files getting imported in the odd emlx format. These are the contents of the “messages” folder:

(Also, I seem to have overwhelmed Eaglefiler. It reports 163,000 files (there can’t possibly be that many emails) and it’s moving at a crawl.

Does it work if you delete (in EagleFiler) the .mbox folder containing that F989 folder and then import that mailbox by capturing from Apple Mail?

The mailbox the F9895 folder is nested under is “All Mail.mbox”–I assume I wouldn’t want to import that, as it would re-import everything I just imported (?).

It looks as though, except for that one small set of messages, all worked out, so I can live with the handful of quirks (and import by mailbox next time).

(Coincidentally I increased my 2011 iMac from 4GB of RAM to 8GB yesterday, but that library is still too slow. Maybe I should create multiple mail archives.)

Also, I don’t understand what those messages in the “messages” folder, under the F9895 one, have in common–they don’t correspond to a mailbox, or to one day, or one sender. I can’t even find them in a mail search.

I recommend going into Gmail’s settings and hiding the All Mail folder from IMAP entirely. It just creates confusion on the Mac because it has a duplicate copy of every message, and yet Apple Mail sometimes recognizes this and hides one of the copies…

What, specifically, is slow? Is there stuff going on in the Activity window? How many messages does your library have, and how many mailboxes?

I just went in and hid “All Mail.” I gather that will prevent mail from re-importing archived gmail messages? (Ones I’ve already archived, I hope, in Eaglefiler.)

Thanks for the tip.

I will tackle slowness issue later …

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Neither Mail nor Gmail knows what you’ve archived in EagleFiler. If you don’t want Mail to download a message from Gmail, you must either delete it or tell Gmail to hide that mailbox from IMAP.

I meant “archived” in Gmail: Hiding “All Mail” will hide thousands of archived messages (“archived” as Gmail defines it) from Mail, I assume. (But I’m in over my head–will have to study up.)

I’m not a Gmail user, but I thought the archived Gmail messages showed up in the special Archive mailbox (below Trash) in Mail.

Hiding “All Mail” from IMAP seems to make the archive (gmail archive) unsearchable even through the web interface. But I’ll keep experimenting.

Eyeballing Eaglefiler, it looks like I have about 100 mailboxes–and it reports 163,000 messages. I get the spinning ball halfway through typing something in search.

I don’t think it should be doing that.

If this is happening in the middle of typing the query, you should either type faster or use the SendsWholeSearchString esoteric preference to turn off live searching.

163K is not that many, but it takes a while to search across 100 different mailboxes. Is it possible for you to merge some of them? That number of messages in a single mailbox should search almost instantly. Also, if you could send in a sample report, I can check for sure what’s causing the slowness.

Okay, I set that preference and merged some mailboxes. I’ll report back with problems.

(I’m moving back to Mail after a couple of years on Gmail, so I face lots of housekeeping. I did try the “hide IMAP” thing once more.)