My university has recently announced that they will be moving all email older than a certain age from our Exchange server to a separate archive. We can access this archive, but only through a different web-only interface. I refer to old email not infrequently as I have a number of recurring projects, the communications around which I reference to see what I did previously. So I am considering email archiving solutions that keep the .eml files on my system and linkable, such as Keep It or EagleFiler. If I Hooked emails in Apple Mail to project files and then later moved/archived those emails from Apple Mail to Keep It or EagleFiler, would the Hook link be preserved? Or would I need to begin archiving to Keep It/EagleFiler first, then creating Hook links?
The short answer that at the moment EagleFiler is not supported by Hook as an email app. And your case may be a bit more complex if you don’t want EagleFiler to be your only Hook Mail client (the email app invoked by Hook to resolve hook://email links), i.e., only for older emails.
a bit longer answer…
If I Hooked emails in Apple Mail to project files and then later moved/archived those emails from Apple Mail to Keep It or EagleFiler, would the Hook link be preserved
hook://email links are preserved – in fact hook://email links are atemporal because they simply code the ID of the email – but the task is to find the email in EagleFiler given a hook://email link.
hook://emails URLs contain the RFC-compliant ID of emails. E.g., here’s a URL to an email (coincidentally, on the subject of looking up emails in EagleFiler) that from Michael Tsai to me in January 2020: hook://email/AB3BFEB7-29C5-411E-806E-2792F155E15D%40c-command.com. EagleFiler supports looking up e-mails by Message-ID if the mailbox is also specified. So in principle it would be possible to automate resolving those URLs, such that EagleFiler would those URLs – again if you knew the library to open. Command-C Software would need to modify EagleFiler for a Library-agnostic solution (providing a cross-library lookup).
Meanwhile, you could extract the RFC-ID from any hook://email URL and feed it into Spotlight, which would find the emails E.g., searching for “AB3BFEB7-29C5-411E-806E-2792F155E15D”. I have not tried that recently with EagleFiler, but I think it gets in ballpark.
Also relevant, Hook has a Copy a Search Link from Clipboard , so one could copy the email ID (or part of it) from the hook://email link and feed it into such a search link.
Once emails are in EagleFiler, you can select the email and call Copy Link as link on it. By default that yields a hook://file/ link, though we’ve provided some scripts to alternative yield an EagleFiler link.
In the future, we would like hook to handle multiple URLs /IDs per object (‘aliases’ / ‘synonyms’).
Sorry this is probably not what you were hoping for, but it does point the way to possibilities.