With the Setup you tell Mail Archiver X, what to archive and into which format. The Setup for archival consist of four tab sheets.
With the first tab sheet "E-mail Client" you choose your mail application from which to archive.
The options to select are:
Use Internet Preferences: In the preferences of Apple Mail you can select your preferred mail application. Mail Archiver X can read this information.
Use E-Mail Client: If you want to archive from a different application, you can select it with this option from a list.
With the second option you can only select applications, which are supported by Mail Archiver X. Currently, supported are the following applications:
(Support for more applications is planned.)
The mail applications all handle mails differently. There are two categorizations possible.
The way of storage: The mbox format stores mail from one mailbox in one file. The organization of the mailboxes is reflected in the organization of the files. The other way is to store mails in a proprietary database. Entourage for instance does this. Both ways to store mail have benefits and drawbacks. The benefits of the mbox format are that the format is simple and quite well known. However, storing large amounts of data in a text file is not state of the art any more. Also every mail applications use/create the format slightly different.
The other categorization is scriptability: A mail application may be controllable by another application (for instance Mail Archiver X) or not. If a mail application cannot be controlled then it cannot be asked to perform certain actions like moving a number of mails to its trash or create a new mail with a specific text. As a result of this missing scriptability some functionality of Mail Archiver X may not be 100% identical over the supported mail applications.
If you select Internet Preferences and your mail application is not yet supported by Mail Archiver X, you will get an error message.
The second tab sheet "Mailboxes" gives you options to automate the selection of Mailboxes, restrict the archival of mails by date and move archived mails to the trash.
Options for "What to archive" are:
If you always archive specific mailboxes but not others, select "Remember last Selection". Mail Archiver X then remembers the last selection of "Select Mailboxes". With "Select Mailboxes" you will be shown a dialog with all your mailboxes, from which you can choose during archival. "Archive all Mailboxes" archives all mailboxes, except the trash, Spam and draft mailboxes.
With "Archive Mails in Range" the archival of mails can be restricted to a range of dates or ages. In the above screenshot you will archive every mail between 01-Jul-2006 and 01-Aug-2006. One of the dates or ages can be omitted.
For date selection a calendar is used:
Click the triangles to go forward or backward one month. Move over the month/year combination to see additional triangles to change the year. It is only possible to select dates prior to the current date. Double click on a date to select it and close the window.
With the third tab sheet "Cleaning" you can select your cleaning options.
The cleaners on the left side of the screen have to be done in a specific order. Therefore, they can be checked or unchecked. The cleaners on the right side can be checked, unchecked and moved by drag and drop. The cleaners are applied from top to bottom. The reset button unchecks the checkboxes and restores the default order.
Left side cleaners:
Note: The cleaners "Export Inline Attachments" and "Remove MIME" have been removed from the Setup of Mail Archiver X 1.5 and are now done always.
Right side cleaners:
Each additional cleaner increases the archival time.
With the fourth tab sheet "Mail export" you can select your export format: Filemaker, Text, Valentina (a fast database by Paradigma Software) and XML.
Select Valentina, if you want to use the integrated browser. Select Filemaker, if you want to use the Filemaker browser. Select text or XML, if you want to create your own archives. Filemaker, Text and Valentina have their own options to set, only XML has none.
Options for Filemaker:
Filemaker is an end user or server database from the Apple daughter company Filemaker Inc. It is currently at version 8.5. You have to own a license of Filemaker, if you want to use the Filemaker browser. The benefit of using Filemaker is that you can use the tools and possibilities of Filemaker. The drawback is that the extensibility of Filemaker is limited. Filemaker is supported for versions 7 and higher.
For the Filemaker export you can set, if you want to be asked for a database during the archiving session. Otherwise you can use the last open archive. It's either possible to archive the attachment files in the Filemaker database or to save the attachment into a folder near the database and a reference is saved in Filemaker.
Please note: Filemaker 5/6 are not supported anymore. Due to a limitation in Filemaker 7 the full attachment handling is not supported. Filemaker 7 is only able to save the names, but neither files or references. There is no error message!
Supplied with Mail Archiver is a database, which can be used together with Mail Archiver X. This database is called "Mail Browser". This database comes as is. Due to the differences in the application environment the Filemaker browser and the internal browser cannot be 100% identical. They will, however, stay similar.
The Filemaker database is not locked and can be changed freely. You only need to take care, not to add fields or to change field names. The field names are checked by Mail Archiver X before trying to export data to Filemaker. There will be an error message, should the field names not match.
To update the Filemaker browser from earlier versions you need to add two fields: MessageBodyHtml and MessageRawData.
Options for Text:
Use this option, if you prefer your own archiving database.
The output for Text export is tab delimited text. This is text, where one record is one row of data. Each field is separated from other fields with a tab. The row ends with a return. In the exported text every tab is replaced with the text "\tab" and a return with the text "\return". The encoding of the data can be set either to MacRoman or UTF8. Select an example file or application for a creator code for the text file by clicking on the "Set..." button.
Options for Valentina:
Use this option, if you want to use the integrated solution of Mail Archiver X (a license for Valentina is not required). This database is very fast and stable.
You can either create a new archive each time you start an archiving session with the option "New Archive". Otherwise you can use the last open archive to add mails to.
When an archive is created, also a file with the ending ".ind" is created. It contains the index of the archive, which is like the index of a book helping to speed up searching. Keep it always near the archive it belongs to. If you move the archive around or delete the index, then a new index will be created after opening the archive again. This may take some seconds.