I’ve seen posts & references in the manual to use F1 over drag and drop due to efficiencies in file storage. However, I think drag and drop will work better with my workflow. I have a few email accounts, most average around 5,000 messages and I have one larger one with about 35,000 messages, so can I get an idea what the difference will be if I choose drag & drop over F1 for importing? Is it seconds or minutes or hours?
My workflow would make it much easier to simply drag and drop messages from time to time from Apple Mail to EagleFiler instead of importing email folders and then merging with previously archived email.
Ok, I’ve just learned two things. 1) I can only drag and drop single messages into folders. Maybe I’m doing this wrong, but this won’t work for me. 2) Folder import by navigating to my ~/Library folder seems more efficient than using F1.
Okay, so maybe I just need some guidance on how people actually put this to use. Do you import everything say on March 18 and then delete from Apple Mail? What if I want to archive up through 2011 in EagleFiler but keep newer stuff in Apple Mail? And then, is there an easy way 3 or 6 or 12 months from now to import and archive my email up through that time period?
It’s not really about the time to import. Rather, when using the library in EagleFiler, it will be more responsive if your mail is stored in mailboxes. For example, when you open a library with 35,000 files, EagleFiler must load the modification date of each file in order for you to be able to view/sort by date, and it must compare each file with the search index to see whether it needs to be updated. With mailboxes, EagleFiler knows that the index doesn’t need to be updated once it’s complete, and it can load all the message metadata at once from an optimized data structure.
This is a general limitation of Apple Mail—it only allows dragging out one message at a time.
It’s more efficient in the sense that the import is faster; EagleFiler can load the files from disk rather than querying Mail to ask which messages were selected. However, after importing the result is the same.
Periodically (when a mailbox gets large or after it’s been a couple months), I import lots of messages at once and then delete them from Apple Mail.
You can create a smart mailbox to find the old messages and import them all at once via F1.