I’m trying to set up a vault in Obsidian inside a folder with .eml files (using the msg handler plugin to view emails). The problem is the folder contains 38231 files with a total size of 4.4GB and when I create a vault there, it freezes Obsidian completely. Is this just a bad use case for Obsidian, or is there a better way to go about it? I simply want to have easy access to those emails. I am using a laptop with AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3500U and 24GB of RAM.
Things I have tried
I searched for freezing causes, read threads where people discussed hypothetical vaults with 1M notes, but nothing directly related to this case. Any advice much appreciated!
Eml files are just text files with some header in it. Better if you rename them to use markdown.
While Obsidian is able to manage your mails, it will struggle with the attachments in it, bc Obsidian isn’t able to load any attachment if you don’t use plugins. Plugins are great, but what if some day your favourite plugin stops to work?
I could be wrong, but to prove that attachments are causing this freezing, consider to create a new vault (without plugins, CSS and themes) and check again, if you can load your mails.
If I’d be in you, I’d launch your familiar mail app, start to group your mails and then, delete superfluous mails in each group to shrink your archived mail to a manageable size.
Mail apps are anyway better suited to deal with mails. Extracting valuable info from mails might be more a hassle than a real benefit.