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

Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?

Author:Samuel Reynolds
Posted:9/7/1999; 3:47:52 PM
Topic:Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?
Msg #:10706 (In response to 10622)
Prev/Next:10705 / 10707

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 use Eudora on the Mac. The built-in solution (in Eudora, at least) is filters. With Eudora's filters, you can sort, delete, and mark messages according to any header field, the content, or a combination. You get filters on Mac or Windows.

I receive and read 80-150 emails a day, direct and from 6 mailing lists. Each list is filtered into a separate mailbox (which opens automatically, but only if there's new mail in it). Some other mail is also filtered into specific mailboxes--such as stuff addressed to me at SpinwardStars.com, and mailto-form emails. So I can let the wargaming mailboxes slide if I don't have time for everything, but still deal quickly with the various Frontier lists (4 of them!). Announcements on the ScriptMeridian Frontier-Community list also get their own mailbox.

Every month, I take about 15 minutes to transfer mail from the previous month from the various mailboxes to matching Archive mailboxes. So my mailbox structure looks something like this:

   In
   Out
   Trash
   - - - -
   Frontier
      Frontier-Bugs
      Frontier-Community
      Frontier-Community-ANN
      Frontier-Users
      Archive
         Frontier-Bugs
            1999
               1999/01
               1999/02
               ...
               1999/08
         Frontier-Community
            1999
               1999/01
               1999/02
               ...
               1999/08
         Frontier-Community-ANN
            1999
               1999/01
               1999/02
               ...
               1999/08
         Frontier-Users
            1999
               1999/01
               1999/02
               ...
               1999/08
   Chipco-List
      Chipco-List
      Archive
         1999
            1999/01
            1999/02
            ...
            1999/08
   etc.

I can then search archived mail using Eudora's (admittedly primitive) search function; it will search entire folder trees at once.

I need a database

[snip]

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.

I could use such a script, as well. I have bits and pieces for it, I just never got around to writing it. But on Mac, using the Eudora AppleEvents glue. I could probably work it out there in a couple of hours.

Somebody (I don't remember who) has archived the ScriptMeridian Frontier-Community list using Frontier; that might be a good starting point.

- Sam

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