importing email from Thunderbird

I’m having difficulty importing email from Thunderbird into Scrivener. I’d love to be able to drag-and-drop an email onto the Research corkboard, but this has no effect. In fact, I’ve found no means to drag an email into Scrivener, at all.

I can copy the contents of an email, open a new text document, and paste the contents. Of course, this doesn’t include the headers, and the “from,” “subject” and “date” are important to me, so I have to type these in. I can also open the source of the email, copy it and paste into a new document. These solutions are enough work that they’re not very useful to me.

Does anyone have any better suggestions?

  • George

If this is something you do a lot, and in bulk, you could consider a tool like Emailchemy. That will let you convert large quantities of e-mail from one format to another, including plain-text files with header information intact. You can then drag all of these plain-text files into Scrivener in one go.

Thanks, Amber,

The problem is that I don’t want to do batches. I want to do individual emails on the spur of the moment.

  • George

In that case I cannot think of anything off-hand that would be better than what you’ve already suggested. I think Tbird can save an email as a file with header information intact, and then that could be dragged into Scrivener, whether or not that is any faster than copy and paste, I don’t know.

I did not tried it with Thunderbird, but I can select all text (cmd-a) in a mail in Mail.app, drag the whole selection with the mouse onto the Research-Icon and a document is automatically created.

All on Snow Leopard.

HTH
juh

Juh,

Thanks! That’s better than copy&paste, but it still doesn’t get me the headers.

  • George

While probably way more header information that you want, if you press Cmd-Opt-U in Mail.app, it will let you select everything at once. I would imagine Thunderbird has a similar capability, probably called “Show Source” or “Show Raw”.

Yes, it does.