On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 20:17, Vaughn Treude wrote:
> Hello fellow comrades in the Penguin:
> 
> I had an idea for a new open-source tool, but I don't know if I'm duplicating 
> any existing effort.  Here's the background:  I use Kmail for all my email.  
> I have only two input mailboxes set up - one is for the contact address on my 
> web page, which gets mostly spam.  The other is for everything else.  Over 
> the last 3 years I've accumulated a ton of project-related correspondence in 
> my inbox, messages I want to save for future reference.  I've been lazy about 
> actually saving the messages elsewhere and then deleting them from the inbox. 
>  The thing is just too darned big now!  I don't want to pre-configure extra 
> mailboxes; sometimes a project goes on longer than I expect, and suddenly I 
> have 100 or more messages in there on that subject.  What I need is a batch 
> processor for the email in my inbox, so I can archive old messages and clean 
> up the file.  These would be some useful functions:
> 
> 1. Extract all email from a particular person to a particular directory, with 
> each message having the receive date appended to the file name.  Attachments 
> would automatically be extracted and saved in the same place, with filenames 
> modified to avoid overwriting.
> 2. Extract all email on a particular thread and concatenate it to a single 
> file, with separator lines ("----------") in between the different messages.
> 3. Extract all unique sender names so I can save them in my contacts file 
> (which is actually a spreadsheet.)  This assumes of course that I delete spam 
> on a timely basis (which is the only timely thing I do at the moment.)
> 
> Part I is pretty much finished, for my purposes anyway.  I call it mbex, for 
> mailbox batch extractor.  I think it could be usable for many setups because 
> the mbox file format seems to be a widespread standard.  But if I was going 
> to distribute this I would need to add lots of options, like how to format 
> the dates that are appended to the file names.  (I do it year-first so they 
> sort alphabetically.)   Feature number 1 will be the most useful to me, but 
> the others would also be great timesavers.  But maybe I'm duplicating 
> features that are already in more sophisticated email clients.  Or maybe I've 
> missed some feature of Kmail (it's not in the help, but heck, I've discovered 
> a lot of features of The Gimp that aren't in the help file.)  I've seen two 
> similar programs mentioned in Google but neither site would come up, implying 
> that perhaps these efforts haven't come to anything.
---
1 - use IMAP / fetchmail / procmail and multiple boxes is easier to
manage. List messages are already broken by the time I use a mail
client, and I can even direct mail from specific users directly to the
giant bit bucket in the sky.  

2 - there are a lot of mbox utilities already available - you might do a
search at google.com/linux or freshmeat.net

3 - If you use IMAP, you can intermittently change mail clients and
sometimes get the best of all worlds. I don't use kmail. I use evolution
and it's search/filter seems really powerful and with IMAP, it's simple
enough to drag messages between folders. Many mail clients 'capture' the
senders mail addresses automatically into their own list.

Craig

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