Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/6/1999; 8:30:53 AM
Topic:Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?
Msg #:10622
Prev/Next:10621 / 10623

If you get a lot of mail..

..and use Eudora or Outlook Express, I bet you have this problem. As time goes by your Inbox gets larger and larger. The system slows down. And then it gets even slower until its barely tolerable. Compacting mailboxes helps. Quitting and relaunching the mailer helps too. (Or so it seems.)

But this is unnecessary because it's sloshing around all that text for one purpose only, so it can present the messages to me sorted by date, or who sent it, or some other attribute. I never need this! After even a few minutes, I get too much mail for this view to be useful.

I need a database

Clearly neither program is a very good database. I don't really have that much content in the files, just a few megabytes. My goal is to still be able to use the mailer as my UI, for a while at least, but to be able to offload storage of the old messages in a database, perhaps even on another machine on my LAN. My UI would be browser-based, just like a search engine, but for my mail.

I am currently using Outlook Express. I have also used Eudora. I find them equally frustrating in this way. As time goes by I push the programs beyond their limits and now (horror!) I think Outlook Express is losing messages because I've pushed it so far. This is one of the things I'm most paranoid about, because I depend on email to do my work. If I lose a message I could lose a deal. Not good!

I want a script

So I want to be gentler to my emailer, I would be happy with a script that controls either Eudora or Outlook Express, that loops over my mailboxes, and if a message is older than seven days, writes it out to a file (XML please) and deletes it from the mailbox. I would run this script every night at midnight along with all my other overnight batch jobs.

So I bet one of these programs is scriptable! Could one of the COM people help out here? I would owe you one. (With my luck Outlook Express probably already has a command that does this and I couldn't find it.)



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