Eclectic Memes

Okay. Sometime in the past couple of months. One of the updates from Apple has fixed my Mail application and it can now open PDF files correctly. (No, I have no idea why it was not working either.)

This now allows me to migrate from Thunderbird to the Apple Mail tool.

Why? Why Mark? Why are you moving from Thunderbird?

Well, Thunderbird is a good mail client. I may even go so far as to say it is an excellent e-mail client. However. Switching to the Apple Mail client will provide much more access to tools for information management on my Mac.

What ‘information management’? I hear you cry.

Well, the problems I have had while using Thunderbird are twofold:

1. Thunderbird does not support Applescript. This limits the access to e-mail held in Thunderbird from other applications.
2. I have become increasingly reliant on DevonThink Pro Office for gathering, filtering, sorting and generally munging information and the integration between DevonThink and Apple Mail is considerably easier to manager (because of the aforementioned AppleScript interface).

So get on with it already!

Ah, if only it were so simple grasshopper.

I have quite a legacy of information in Thunderbird. I also have a large collection of rules that filter and direct incoming e-mail in all manner of interesting ways. Ensuring that the information is correctly preserved and accessible is one reason for delay. Another reason for delay is the configuring of rules to categorise mail in the new setup.

Big friggin’ deal. Just import the e-mail into Apple Mail and set up the rules manually. Yes. Good idea. But. Rather misses the point.

In the new world order of e-mail handling I will have two means to store and process e-mail — Apple Mail and DevonThink — and each of these is good at doing one part of the job I have in mind.

Apple Mail is good for fetching, writing and replying to e-mail (let’s face it this is the minimum one would expect from an e-mail client). DevonThink kicks ass when it comes to sorting, categorising and searching through information (including e-mails).

In Thunderbird the rules are serving double duty; on the one hand helping to filter and direct incoming e-mail to make it manageable, while on the other hand also providing a filing structure to make it easier to find older e-mails.

In the new world order, Apple Mail’s rules are only needed to direct incoming e-mail to make it manageable to respond to. Once the e-mail is pushed into DevonThink the archiving, filtering, sorting and general munging will be taken over by an existing set of rules, to which a few more need to be added to reproduce some of the filing work currently done in Thunderbird.

So, you see, it may seem simple but until I have time to sit down and think this through I am loathed to start what will be quite a large job of migrating from one system to the other.

(In fact I will run both e-mail programs in parallel for a while to make sure I am happy with the Apple Mail/DevonThink setup before abandoning Thunderbird.)