Support
We provide email support for all our products. In addition, feel free to comment on this page with questions and or tips.
contact@spotdocuments.com is the address for email tech support. Please include as many details as you can think of, including the version of Email Archiver you are using, along with the version of OS X (Email Archiver requires 10.8 or later of OS X, and is built and tested on 10.10. It is a developer signed application). If you have an older version of the OS, please contact support, we have a version for 10.6.8 and later (2.8.1).
Also don’t forget to read the manual!
Email for support at contact@spotdocuments.com
Upgrading to El Capitan (OSX 10.11.*)?
Apple Mail has changed their folder structure, please update your preferences.
Mail now lives at ~/Library/Mail/V3 (previously it was at ~/Library/Mail/V2)
Your ‘sources’ should now look something like this:
About Email Archiver Licensing
Email Archiver is available with two licenses. The Mac App Store licensing scheme is not suitable for IT departments or other people who may need to use Email Archiver as a support tool, etc. Email Archiver Pro does the exact same job as Email Archiver. The only difference is the licensing method. With Email Archiver Pro, you enter a license purchased from our store at FastSpring or Kagi, allowing use on other computers / tech support / etc.
You can download Email Archiver Pro here. This is now a trial version, in that it is fully functional, but will only run for a few minutes at a time.
Please note that the forum below is not for one on one tech support. Please email us if you have a specific problem.
Privacy And Security Information is here.
Email Archiver 
really interesting product. I have a question: email archiver works with postbox? thanks for a prompt reply. Maurizio Bortolotti
I have not used postbox. Email Archiver takes folders of ‘.eml’ or ‘.emlx’ files and turns them into PDFs. So if postbox makes eml files, it would likely work.
Just used Email Archiver to export a folder of emails to pdfs. Worked perfectly. I would like to have the choice to name each file with tags like http://www.andreasamann.com/MacOSX/Mail_Scripts. “%Y-%M-%d %f – %s” gave me the power to name the file the way I wanted. Also, I’d like the choice to have it create folders for the year and month as an option. The current settings would be good for defaults.
I am trying to figure out a good way to enable custom naming.
The way the app works is simple (conceptually). It looks at each emlx (or .eml) file, determines a file name and path for the resulting PDF, and if that file is not there, it creates it. So if I naively just added different naming options, then Email Archiver would recreate all the PDFs (which it would have to do, I guess) but they would be mixed in with the old others. One thought is to have custom name and folder formats in a folder of their own:
Archives/Mail/V2/tom.andersen@gmail.com/INBOX/2012/3/2012-03-23…pdf Is the current path, then if you picked a different naming option, it could throw them all in:
Archives/NAMEPATTERN-%Y-%M-%d%f–%sNoYEARNoMonth/Mail/V2/tom.andersen@gmail.com/INBOX/2012-03-23…pdf
There is also another problem – do I let you make your own mistakes? – For instance many emails have the exact same subject line, and so without a date expressed in seconds, Email Archiver would miss creating many emails – for example if your pattern only had ‘subject’.pdf as a template, it would not work well.
Thanks for the suggestion – you are not the first to ask this!
–Tom
I see the problem. I needed your app to export one folder for an ad hoc export. I see that others are constantly exporting…
Maybe the app loads with the defaults as you have them now. Then if a user changes the naming, you show a warning that email exported in the past could be exported again using the new file name.
For uniqueness, I think you could also warn the user that not having a timestamp could result in missed messages.
For my particular need, I wanted to name the files with the same timestamp as you use now with the from name followed by the subject.
Email archiver crashed. What is going wrong? The following is the crash-notice:
.. crash report… (edited out by admin)
Hi,
Crash reports are best dealt with by emailing support – contact@spotdocuments.com. We are working on this issue, so please email us for an update.
–Tom
why is the conversion so slow? It has taken almost an hour to process 700 files. Doesn’t even seem to be processing now, although the blue bar shows activity.
The speed of the process is affected by a few things. Keep in mind that Email Archiver is essentially ‘printing to PDF’ each email. If you have say 10,000 emails this can take a while the first time. Subsequent runs only make missing PDFs and so are much faster. Several users have said that its really quite fast.
On a laptop, or smaller, slower system, it will be slower. You should use it with the Laptop plugged in for the initial process.
Also Email Archiver does not really run a ‘conversion’ – it leaves all your email files untouched, it only reads them and creates PDF files in a directory that you pick.
–Tom
Hi Tom,
After using EA for a few months (and very happy with it too), I have another feature request. It’s probably a quirky one that others may not like at all, so I guess it might be best as a user option and not default. For the way I interact with archived e-mails, the arrangement of having the e-mail as one file and it’s attachments as separate files within a folder, while not bad, is not ideal. It would actually suit me a little better if the e-mail and it’s attachment/s were merged together into a single PDF file. Would it be possible to make that an option?
Lance,
Thanks for the kind words! I have looked a bit at this possibility, but it looks too complicated to do without introducing bugs. Also there are only a few file types available – there is no way to embed a .zip file or several other file types into an email. For PDF attachments, the only way that I could add the PDF pages to the bottom of the email would certainly introduce bugs in the layout of the PDF – its not guaranteed that the email and the attachments were destined for the same paper size, for instance.
You can use a manual tool to merge things into a PDF, which I guess is only useful if you don’t need to do hundreds or more. Also, if you search in Email Archiver, you can right click on an email to show all the attachments for that email.
Thanks for the reply, Tom. Two follow-on thoughts …
1. Is there are manual tool you can suggest that would play well with the files generated by EA?
2. An alternative for my workflow might be a feature that would allow me to ignore attachments when archiving. Basically I end up with a heap of duplicate files (which fact I just choose to ignore), because I’ve mostly saved the attachments I want to other locations. So maybe that’s a better way to achieve what I want. Is that more doable?
Me again, Tom. … Just to fly a kite, here … I’m having an issue with system crashes related to the process “renderpdf” hogging resources. It’s just occurred to me that this could possibly related to EA. Is that possible / likely, do you think? Is there something you could tweak in EA that might minimise the problem?
And again .. just to add that I think I’ve nailed my issue as *definitely* related to EA. I have EA set to run during screen save. I’ve noticed twice today that the computer has apparently frozen during screensaver. Stays unresponsive, with beach balling some of the time, for several minutes. Finally get rid of the screensaver, and the system gra-a-a-dually returns to functionality. I then get into Activity Monitor, to find renderpdf using between 1 & 2 GB of RAM, plus about 4GB of virtual memory. I then bring EA to the front, to find that it’s processing. Presumably by this stage it’s nearing the end of its processing, and on the two observations today it finished about 5 seconds after I brought it to the front.
So presumably there’s some bug for you to fix somewhere? I’m not much of a geek. But if you explain things carefully enough I imagine I could send you some logs from Console or similar. My address is lance [at] glenbaron [dot] com . Thanks.
Bump.
Hope you’re onto this, Tom. It’s very nearly in the showstopper category, I’m afraid. Just had another renderpdf-affected freeze. This time it was permanent, necessitating a forced computer restart. Whenever it’s that bad, the result appears to be that Spotlight needs to rebuild its index. Not much fun.
Lance, can you try this when the screen saver is not running? I wonder if there is a problem when using it under the screen saver. Perhaps it can’t get to to resource that it needs. It seems funny that it would finish a huge 2GB render just as you are coming of screen saver. Also I have no other reports of this problem.
Hi Tom. Thanks for the reply. FWIW, I just ran an EA scan manually, and sat and watched Activity Monitor (sorting by real memory, descending) for the whole process. It all ran very smoothly, really. Certainly had the fan racing at a few points, but nothing earth shattering. renderpdf used very little memory, spiking as high as 350MB once, about 150MB several times, mostly not even visible in the list.
But it seems to be pretty consistently an issue when in screen save. What now … ?
At the risk of embarrassment for “speaking too soon”, I’ve had none of the above behaviour – and haven’t even seen renderpdf in the activity window – since upgrading to Mountain Lion. Maybe there’s been some bug with renderpdf in Lion, which Apple has quietly fixed in ML? (There seem to be a few of those … )
I would really like a free trial to see how this works but in lieu of that can you tell how filing of the attachments is organized relative to the email it was attached to? My wife has thousands of emails with large (PDF) real estate contract files attached. I need to archive it all because I just realized her whole filing system is within Mail (yikes!) but the email and attachment has to be easy to find. From what I can glean from the above posts the email and attachment(s) are separated.
Tony,
Email Archiver creates email in the same hierarchy of folders that Mail.app is using.
A typical email PDF would be in:
~/Documents/Email Archives/Mail/V2/me@you.com/INBOX/2012/8/2012-08-31 15.37.35Z Subject of Email.pdf
Then if there were attachments:
~/Documents/Email Archives/Mail/V2/me@you.com/INBOX/2012/8/2012-08-31 15.37.35Z Subject of Email (attachments)/Contract.docx
etc
Hi,
emails are often moved into different folders within the first say 6 months. After 6 month they are much less likely to be moved to a different folder (which creates duplicate archived pdfs.) Can you not implement the possibility to choose how old an email must be before it is archived? So then I could choose 6 months, have emails automatically deleted after 6 months and my mailbox would always only constist of the current 6 months.
THX,
Rene
Rene,
That sounds like a nice addition. I will look at it. There are some emails that have badly formed dates, so its not trivial to do perhaps. Right now, the way I use it is that I only run it after I have filed away my inbox, etc.
I have just purchased EA and was looking for a similar option – you could implement it with a caveat on malformed dates, even flag malformed dates and move to a special folder?
Also, any chance of an affiliate program? I think I could sell this all day long!
Doees it works with Sparrow?
I have not tried Sparrow. For Sparrow to work with Email Archiver, it would have to able to create a folder of “.eml” or “.emlx” files. Outlook for the Mac can for instance export these files, even though it does not use them internally. Any Sparrow experts want to chime in?
Hi, i’m a new user and love to make some PDFs by drag and drop. The result looks better as the print to PDF from Mail.app.
The only thing, which i miss, is the possibility to change the borders from the PDF. After converting, the borders are really large and a one side document will be printed to two sides and looks a little bit bad.
Can you add a page(borders) configuration?
Sorry for my english!
Thank you very much
P.Si
Hi, thanks for writing. You can adjust the borders somewhat by using the ‘Page Setup’ feature of Email Archiver. Before you start creating emails, pick the printer and page size that you would like to make the PDFs for. This includes border adjustment on most printers. Note that nothing will print, but Email Archiver is essentially making the emails into PDFs – a process that uses the print architecture on the computer.
Can you please show an example of how the file looks when you have an email with attachments/ I have @ 500 emails , many with attachments that I need to save to pdf with the attachments and was thinking about using your program. I have heard that you can do this automatically with Outlook where the pdf email and attachments are all in one document, but no one seems to be able to do the same thing with a MAC. Looks like you come close but I don’t see any examples on your web page.
Thanks in advance.
Hi,
I added a screenshot of what typical output looks like in the Finder.
https://emailarchiverpdf.com/2012/03/08/46/
–Tom
Thanks. I am going to try it.
I have been using email archiver to archive my emails at the end of each week to a local drive. I have decided to have the archive of my emails sent to a Drobo FS storage device. I am not bothered about the speed of copy, but I am concerned about the duration, I was wondering if email archiver uses any archive bit setting so as not to keep backing up up the same mails every time as this will take me hours to backup my mails.
In the past I saved batches of e-mail as .rtf files. Will I be able to use e-mail archiver to save them as pdf files?
Email Archiver can only archive folders of .eml or .emlx files. So it does not look like it would work for those files. Email tech support if you need more info. –Tom
Hi – used email archiver for a week or two now. A couple of suggestions – firstly on the summary screen telling me that x number of emails have been archived, a date/time for this would be good. Secondly, I have the archiver set up to run on start up, but most of the time I use “sleep” rather than a full shutdown, so does it archive on start-up from sleep (I can’t tell – see previous comment) ? . Otherwise, all good !
Mike,
Thanks for the suggestions. I would like to add the date feature. I don’t think it will archive on waking from sleep.
Hi, how can I dig into all the PDF files?, is possible to look for something like a name, serial number, etc?.
They are just PDF and attachment files on your hard drive, so Spotlight or any search tool will work. The easiest way is to press Search in Email Archiver then put the search into the ‘contents’ area.
My issue is disk space. What is the space requirement for a typical email archive without an attachment?
Keith,
Email Archiver is not a space saving application, unless you choose to archive a lot of emails on your macbook, then move the archive somewhere, and then remove the emails from your email account. For my 200,000 emails, I have 14GB for my archive, and 10 GB for all the email mail folder.
Hello,
Is there a way to archive web based emails from my Yahoo account?
Hi,
You need to have the emails on a Mac. So for a Yahoo account you would need a Mac set up with Mail.app to get all the Yahoo email. Then run Email Archiver. Thanks –Tom
Hi,
I’m in a non US country, and when I export emails foreign characters appear ina weird format in the PDF.
Is there a way to add international support to the program?
Thanks in advance
We have discovered a bug in Email Archiver 2.6.2, which is fixed now in Email Archiver Pro. This only affects people making certain non – English email PDFs when in a non -English region. Please contact support for more details.
Hello,
we would like to use your program in Germany. Yes, we use some strange characters like äöüÄÖÜß in our language. Are these characters fully supported by Email-Archiver or only by Email Archiver Pro ?
Thanks in advance
Yes Email Archiver works with the full unicode character sets. Although there have been some small problems in the past, it seems most of these are licked now. Email Archiver Pro is a better bet if you ever want to Archive Emails on another computer, as the licence is easier to transfer. They are about the same app, but minor updates come out more frequently for the Pro version, due to the Apple Ap Store approval process.
I’d like to have the option of having the app terminate after performing a scan for new email. This way I could run the app on a custom schedule using something like Lingon/launchd. Otherwise, I’m very happy with the app. Saving emails to searchable PDFs works very well for me.
Thanks for the kind words. I guess this could be an option in the prefs, I will look into it. –Tom
Hi! just a question before purchasing this app.
Will this app convert files ending with “.mbox” to pdf?
I had all my PC Outlook folders saved on a hard drive and now I want to import them into my new Mac with this app if possible.
Thanks!
Renee
Email Archiver will convert .mbox files. Just drag them on to the app icon in the dock. Then pick a folder for all the emails to go into. You will get PDFs and attachment folders.
Thanks,
–Tom
Is Email Archiver able to handle tags created with MailTags?
Email Archiver will set tags on an email based on any MailTags it finds in the email. In addition, the Mailtags will be in the email header in the PDF.
I’ve been using the trial version, and my main concern was whether the PDF created were fully searchable. After testing, it does seem that this is the case and I am able to search the entire content of the archived emails. Here’s the thing, my plan was to send the archived emails to a folder on a Drobo FS, but I discovered that the search, both the built in and apparently Spotlight, don’t return the proper results. I’ll get maybe 1 or 2 hits or nothing while it worked correctly when the archive is stored locally. The whole idea was to conserve space on my hard drive. Do you know of a solution to this problem?
Thanks
Tom,
You have run into a Spotlight searching problem that has nothing to do with Email Archiver. Drobo and most other NAS drives will not be spotlight searchable unless you make (the sometimes heroic) efforts to get Spotlight to index it.
http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/list/search/1/kw/mac/search/1
http://support.drobo.com/app/answers/list/search/1/kw/spotlight/search/1
http://superuser.com/questions/102643/how-to-get-os-x-to-index-my-network-volumes-with-spotlight
–Tom
Mac/ Archiving Smart Mailbox Content
Sir, we are a law firm and use Mac Mail Smart Mail Box feature to separate individual client correspondence from the mass inbox data. We would love to use your software to convert all of the emails in a given Smart Mailbox to PDF archive and then save PDF archives to our third-party cloud provider database in a folder titled Archive Emails.
We just bought your software and haven’t yet determined how we can select a particular Smart Mailbox to archive. Is this possible?
Email Archiver works on ‘real’ mailboxes only. We have no access to the smart mailboxes that are really just searches through your email. You can of course create a new email folder and drag all the client emails into that new folder. But it may be that you have too many clients, etc to do this. You can also just make an archive of all email, and then use something like the Finder or ‘Leap’ or ‘HoudahSpot’ to create saved searches for each client in the archive of emails. You then bookmark these searches, which would be much like the smart mailboxes you have in mail.app.
–Tom
Another solution would be to import the PDFs (either the entire PDF or a reference) into a database like FileMaker.
I need to archive emails I stored in different mail clients (my outlook in the office and my mac outlook at home).
there are plenty of duplicated email. Is this SW able to spot and remove duplicates ?
Email Archiver is not a duplicate removal tool, since it only creates PDFs. It never erases them.
But it should be able to handle the outlook and Mail.app emails for you.
You may be able to use a duplicate tool, check http://macupdate.com
–Tom
I am considering EA for a use-case where email receipts/invoices/orders are saved to file for further automated processing. My inbound receipts come in 2 flavors:
1) receipt is formatted as the main email body as text/RTF/HTML,
2) receipt is attached in pdf (typ) format.
My challenge is how to programmatically:
1) discern which EA-outputted pdf’s actually contain the receipt
2) move the pdf receipts to a different processing folder.
EA works perfectly to save the emails and their attachments. The issue is EA’s folder-save structure because there is no way (that I have found) to recursively dig into 10 layers of folders and extract and move the pdf to the next step in the workflow.
Questions in support of above:
1) Would it be possible to modify EA function to name the attachment with same name as the parent email pdf, but add the word “attachment” to the end of it’s filename? I could then use a Folder Action or a utility like Hazel to locate and process the attachments using a Match function on “attachment” (or something similar).
2) I use Tags for email & other document file tagging. Tags uses standard Open Meta conventions, but I have noticed that tagged emails do not save their tag metadata with EA. When I use Leap or Tags’ built-in tag browser, I can see the tagged email messages inside the email mbox, but not in the EA-generated pdf’s. Are you planning to add support for tagging solutions other than MailTags?
If you think there is another path to salvation, I am certainly open to it!
– Mark
Can you please tell me what the purpose of the “export” button is? Would I be exporting the entire archive? In what way and why might I choose to do that? Thanks.
You would use the ‘Export’ button only rarely. It makes an entirely new archive in a new folder (under ‘exports’). It is good for email exports for legal work, and a few others. My plan is to move it to a menu item so its less likely to get used by accident. Exports have the additional feature that duplicate emails will make duplicate Pdfs.
What’s the difference between the Start and the Export button in EmailArchiver Pro 2.8.1? The manual doesn’t mention the Export button, only the Start button, but the process behind ‘Export’ takes a lot longer so it must be different.
Also, could the ‘close program’ button be enabled? I don’t like it why it’s grayed out, it serves no purpose right?
Export makes an entire new Archive, dated ‘today’. Useful for various situations. Usually the Start button is what you want, it only does an update to your current Archive.
This app helps me a lot.
It would be very handsome if the first part of the name of the file (= date & time) could be added as a first part of the name of the attachments… I need to make a pdf of all mails of a running project including the (pdf-)attachments, in order to make them ready to save them as a pdf-binder (so I can take them with me in my iPad). I’ve just added manually this (date & time-)part of the names of the files to the names of the attachments (one map of emails of one month of a project): it took 1 3/4 hour …
Could this possibility be added as a pref choice?
Emails are named with dates, and the folder for the attachments is also named with dates. The thinking with keeping the actual attachments with their original file names is that often the file names of attachments matter – (the email never was a file so never had a file name). Perhaps you can use the folder name to get at the attachments? –Tom
Is it OK to manually delete emails from the archive, either singly or in batches, without messing up the system.
You can delete them from the archive. But if the original email is still there, email archiver may re-create the PDF on the next run.
Hi there,
Just bought your product for Outlook and began experimenting. I acknowledge that attachments are placed in a folder with the same name, but the naming convention for attachments is different using “_” in dates rather than “-” like the name of the email.
So my question is…would it be possible that pdf’ed attachments are named using exactly the same naming convention as the email but with a suffix of say…”attcah a”, “attach b” ect.?
I feel this would make it easier to sort all the files rather than having to look for folders to find attachments & then manually having to change naming convention.
Thanks in advance.
Regards – Marco
Will it work with email from an imap-server?
Yes it will work with Apple Mail only, and Apple Mail can drag in email from IMAP, POP. Please also check out our new product – Email Archiver Pro 3 – which has direct IMAP connections. http://emailarchiverpro.com