I've been using the Email plugin for about a decade, BUT this is the first time I've needed to pull >100k old emails down from the email server to Filemaker. I'm finding that anything over 2k emails being retrieved seems to choke FileMaker, and retrieving 2k at a time is going to take a loooong time for two email accounts.

What have you folks come up with for bringing decades worth of email into FileMaker?

Hi Larry,

This is not a usual use case for the Email plugin, and I cannot say that we have done anything along the same lines before. If you have an Enterprise License of Email, then you could potentially use a server-scheduled script to pull emails down in batches over time. I believe that would be the best case for you.

Otherwise, you can try running a script that pulls emails in a loop, and limit the number of iterations, either with a variable and conditional statement to exit the loop, or use the SetRecursion function. Then, have that script run as an InstallOnTimer script, and leave that to run over the weekend.

Alternatively, you can look into exporting your emails from whatever service you are using, and try importing them into FileMaker natively.

To add to what Nick said, you can also decrease the overhead of pulling this many messages in at once by not downloading attachments (if they aren't required). If you are just doing this for archival purposes, you can download all the messages sans attachments and then if there comes a time where you need the attachment(s) for a particular message, you can do a read for that message's attachments using the messageID.