I want X1 for OS X

December 5, 2006 2:18 PM

OS X and large amounts of email. Recent switcher wants to mimic the current behavior of Outlook + X1.

I have just switched to a Mac. I'm in a corporate environment where I have been using Outlook and keeping all my email for 5+ years. For better or worse I use this database of email as my main repository of all my information. I have about 1 gig of email on the exchange server and 4-5 gigs of offline archive on my laptop (in 4 different PSTs). I think it's about 120k emails all in all. I index the whole mess with a Windows app called X1 (http://www.x1.com). One of the nice things x1 does is it also peers into attachments, not just the text of the email. What this allows me to do is find just about anything work related in seconds. Need to know what proposal we sent to ABC Co. last year? Fire up X1 and enter "ABC doc". I have the result in less than 2 seconds. I already have replicated this whole environment in both Parallels and the VMWare Fusion Beta. It works fine, but I'd love to be less Windows dependent in general. Also, I have resigned myself to using Entourage on the OS X side, even though I find it a little worse than Outlook - this is because I need corporate calendaring as well. My questions are :

1. How do I import 5 gigs of email into OSX (it's mostly in .PSTs), specifically Entourage. Has anyone tried O2M or Emailchemy with this amount of email?

2. Provided I can import it, can Entourage handle 5 gigs of mail? If so, how quickly can Spotlight find a needle in a 5 gig haystack? Does it look in attachments?

3. Is there something X1 like? Is there a better note program or data management program where I could set up Entourage to warehouse into?

Thanks in advance!

posted by ill3 to computers & internet (11 comments total)

It's been my exerience that Entourage gets fucked with that much mail.

Will Spotlight not do what you want with X1?
posted by rbs at 3:16 PM on December 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

If I can't put that much mail into Entourage, where and in what format would I put these emails in so that Spotlight could look at them?
posted by ill3 at 4:25 PM on December 5, 2006

Spotlight loves old-fashioned maildirs, since they're just folders full of small text files, and that's what it excels at.
posted by rokusan at 7:19 PM on December 5, 2006

1. How do I import 5 gigs of email into OSX

Set up a small IMAPD on a local machine, connect to it from Outlook, move all the mail to your IMAP account. When that is done, connect to it in Mail or Entourage, and copy all your email from the IMAP account.

2. Provided I can import it, can Entourage handle 5 gigs of mail? If so, how quickly can Spotlight find a needle in a 5 gig haystack? Does it look in attachments?

I'm not even sure Spotlight will index Entourage mailboxes. Give Apple's Mail a go? It's certainly not perfect, but it's nevertheless a very nice client.

On my old 1.25 Powerbook G4, it takes 5 seconds for stuff to show up in the results, 37 seconds for the search to complete.

3. Is there something X1 like?

Spotlight will index all your messages and attachments. In the results, it will find you the message containing the attachment and the attachment, and display both.

Is there a better note program or data management program where I could set up Entourage to warehouse into?

The next version of Mail will let you store notes inside of it. If you need something more powerful, you could try DevonThink. The Pro version imports email from Mail and entourage, and has a plugin for Mail.
posted by stereo at 8:33 PM on December 5, 2006

I'm not even sure Spotlight will index Entourage mailboxes.

It does now. Or rather, Entourage writes all your e-mail messages out to little text files so that Spotlight can index them. (File attachments aren't included, though, I don't think.)

I can't imagine having five gigs of mail unless that includes some big attachments. After ten years of using e-mail I have about 700 MB. However, I am not at all sure that Entourage would not be able to handle it.
posted by kindall at 12:49 AM on December 6, 2006

I don't know X1 at all, but for archiving that much email on OS X I'd try out mailsteward.
posted by Steve3 at 8:14 AM on December 6, 2006

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I'm checking out DevonThink and will look at mailsteward and will keep you posted.

kindall: I wish I was inflating the figure. I get a lot of email and I delete all the goofy movies and things like that people send me, and it's still huge.
posted by ill3 at 10:57 AM on December 6, 2006

File attachments aren't included, though, I don't think.

I just did a little test and it appears kindall is correct on this. I sent myself an email with a unique string in an attachment and in the body. Spotlight finds the string in the bodies (the one in Sent Items and the one in Inbox), but not the attachments.

Stupid Microsoft...
posted by blm at 11:19 AM on December 6, 2006

Eh, I dunno if I'd call them stupid for THAT. I mean, I wouldn't want two copies of every attachment I receive. If I want to be able to search for a mail attachment, it's probably something I'm going to work on, so I'll pull it out of the mail app anyway.

I do throw away a lot of my mail. In fact about 90% of the mail I get goes into a special folder where it's purged a couple months after I read it. (For historical reasons it's called Mailing Lists, because originally I just treated mailing lists that way. I suppose I should change its name at some point.) Only stuff I need to act upon goes to my Inbox.
posted by kindall at 4:48 PM on December 6, 2006

I dunno, I don't think you would need two copies for Spotlight to search it.

I suspect we are in very different lines of work, Kindall. The reason I keep the documents in the original email structure is it gives me the context they were delivered in.

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions. Devonthink pro office is in BETA, but seems kinda promising. MailStewart seems like a good archival tool, but it's definitely much clumsier than x1.

I'm a bit astounded that there is nothing quite comparable on OS X. As Windows programs X1, Copernic, and even Google Desktop all do a better job at this than anything I have seen on OS X.

I'm loving everything else though, so I suspect I will stick with Parallels until I figure out a different way.
posted by ill3 at 9:53 PM on December 6, 2006

Yeah, the reason people send me documents is so I can edit them and send them back. So almost every document I get has to come out of Entourage anyway. I leave them attached for incoming mail, because I'm lazy, but I have an outgoing mail rule that strips the attachment after it's sent.
posted by kindall at 12:58 PM on December 7, 2006