Vaughn, I'm very interested in your idea.
I also use kmail, though I have set up lots of folders into which I move
mail as it corresponds to different themes and projects; but I think your
mbex idea would be useful and I'd like to see what you have and
experiment with it. Can you attach it to an email and send a sample
to me at
joe@actionline.com?
If I'm understanding you right, it seems that your mbex utility might
possibly be further developed with some additional applications,
including perhaps extracting repetitive subjects, "from" addresses,
and other identifiers that can be saved in a "to-be-flushed" file and
extracting to the trash folder -- and perhaps just flushing them all
automatically. I see a number valuable possibilities.
joe
----------------------------------------------
On Friday 30 July 2004 20:17, you 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.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Vaughn
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