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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