I would like to know if there’s any way I can use Scrivener to keep track of e-mail messages I send and receive that pertain to research I am conducting for one of my book ideas.
When I send out an e-mail message, I would like to maintain a record of the person or entity I contacted along with the date and time of initial message, subject and content of message.
When I receive a response via e-mail, I would like to have a record of this response (in detail) as well.
I am using the Apple Mail program configured to access a Gmail account via IMAP. I believe it is possible to export a single e-mail message from Apple’s Mail program, but I do not know what format would import most intelligently into Scrivener, if any.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated…
Drag the sent message out to your desktop. Drag the file on the desktop into your research folder in the binder. Do the same with any messages you receive on the topic.
Click/select the message in the binder and press the spacebar, you’ll see a preview of the message with the header and message body but that is all you can do with it short of opening the desktop file with a text editor prior to importing into Scrivener, spending a minute or two editing out the header junk, saving as a text file and importing the resulting file into Scrivener.
Also if you have your mail client set up to save messages to your hard drive, rather than just opening them on the server when you look at them, you can drag a message straight from the Mail list to a Reference pane in the Scrivener project. By default the subject will populate the Description column, but you can edit this to whatever is useful internally. To open the message in the future, just highlight it and press Enter, or double-click on the icon. Like all linking solutions, the integrity of the archive is dependent upon the retention of the external files. So if you lose your Mail archive, these links won’t save you. If you want a hard copy in your project for long-term storage, I’d recommend using “Save As…” from Mail to produce a plain-text or RTF style file. That’s going to be more long-term friendly than the .emx format. Apple has already changed their mail format numerous times.