Support
We provide email support for all our products. In addition, feel free to comment on this page with questions and or tips.
[email protected] 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 10.6.8 or later of OS X, and is built and tested on Lion).
Also don’t forget to read the manual!
Email for support at [email protected]
About Email Archiver Licensing
Email Archiver is available with two licenses. The Mac App store purchase is perhaps the easiest way to get Email Archiver, and is also cheaper. 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. It costs more to buy Email Arhiver Pro, and it 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, 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. The price here reflects a discount assuming that you may have purchased a copy of Email Archiver from the MAS.
Please note that the forum below is not for one on one tech support. Please email us if you have a specific problem.
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/[email protected]/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/[email protected]/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 - [email protected]. 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/[email protected]/INBOX/2012/8/2012-08-31 15.37.35Z Subject of Email.pdf
Then if there were attachments:
~/Documents/Email Archives/Mail/V2/[email protected]/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.
http://emailarchiverpdf.com/2012/03/08/46/
-Tom