Email archiving? I'm sticking with DEVONthink
I've used DEVONthink for years to archive email. When I was using the application a lot more for paperless storage it made sense and it worked (and still works) well. But I've since moved away from DT and thought I'd look for something a bit more purpose-built for email archiving. Given that a lot of Black Friday sales are on I figured I'd take a look at two Mac apps:
- Mail Archiver X
- Horcrux
Mail Archiver X provides no benefit over DEVONthink whatsoever so that was an instant no-go. The user interface is also pretty ugly and a bit weird to use.
Horcrux actually looked really cool. Not only does it archive email but it also allows the easy transfer of email from one IMAP server to another. I had been thinking of mirroring my Fastmail account to Gmail or elsewhere so that was a pretty attractive option. For continuity they also offer a Ruby script to deal with restores should something happen to the app.
In practice though it wasn't so great. Google apparently killed their ability to connect to Gmail (I've seen this mentioned with other apps trying to connect to Google services, not just Gmail) but that ended any option for me as Gmail would be the service I'd mirror to. The developer says on their blog they've been working with Google to restore this but not sure how long that will take if it ever happens. I also tried using Horcrux to move the email from Fastmail to iCloud. iCloud is a pretty standard IMAP service and I received too many errors to feel comfortable using the product in that respect.
So it's back to DEVONthink for email archiving. I have never had an issue with it and I've already paid for it so I will keep using it.