Parsing Filtered mail

[Frolickin]

I receive a number of e-mails daily with the same format, but different
content that I filter into a folder. I would like to run something (what
that is, I do not know) that would be able to go through the mail in this
folder and extract certain information from each e-mail and write it to a
database.

The e-mail is identical, the data is not. I would think that a utility
could be scripted to copy certain portions from the e-mail.

Does anyone know of something that might work for this?

I am open for suggestions,
Fro.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Funny enough, this is exactly what I spent a portion of this week
setting up. However, didn't use anything in Outlook as I didn't see
clearly how to do it, nor had any tools. I suspect some 3rd party tools
available and maybe could do with VBA or .NET programming but it wasn't
clear to me how to do nor clear what tools I needed to buy. I preferred
it to be independant of the desktop machine.

So .. set it up on the mail server and gained the benefit of it all
running automatically on the mail server independant of the Outlook
client (runs 24 hours a day vs. my desktop not turned on or available
all the time). And I didn't buy a any software.

Incoming mail received by mail server (SMTP on a Linux box). The
standard program 'procmail' filters all incoming mail to detect the mail
I wish to handle. Based on this filtering 'procmail' pushes the mail
content to a small program in Python that I wrote. The Python program
reads the mail and then searches for the text elements in the email
header and message (using standard Python library functions). The
program builds up a SQL insert query to insert the data into a a
database (MySQL) server. Added error trapping and exception detection
to make it as bullet-proof as I could. I use Microsoft Access to connect
to the MySQL database server to view/edit/handle the data ... at
intervals and ad hocly. The receiving of mail and feeding the database
runs 24x7.

This may not fit your needs e.g. you may not have an idependant mail and
database server ... but it's not difficult to have such a thing and
given your business need may well suit your needs.

rms

 

[Frolickin]

Funny enough, this is exactly what I spent a portion of this week
setting up.

While that would do what I desire, I am not running Linux and do not have
those types of permissions on the server. I would much prefer, at this
point, to do this on the workstation.

Thank you for the idea. I appreciate it.