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.
Any comments?
Vaughn
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