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.)
There are responses to this message:
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, I hate this., 9/6/1999; 8:57:30 AM
- Can it really be true?, Jeremy Bowers, 9/6/1999; 11:12:39 AM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, Howard Hansen, 9/6/1999; 11:44:31 AM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, Nick Sweeney, 9/6/1999; 3:53:23 PM
- I need a script too, Paul Howson, 9/6/1999; 4:29:38 PM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, Bryant Durrell, 9/6/1999; 5:11:16 PM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, Wesley Felter, 9/6/1999; 5:35:07 PM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, ramesh@ramesh.com, 9/6/1999; 8:14:31 PM
- Email Solutions, Eric Soroos, 9/6/1999; 11:38:27 PM
- Script possibilities..., Ken Kennedy, 9/7/1999; 7:32:11 AM
- Re: Can I script Outlook Express or Eudora?, Samuel Reynolds, 9/7/1999; 3:47:52 PM
- Re: Filemaker Pro Mail Archiving Solution, Ben Griffiths, 9/8/1999; 2:25:45 PM
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:26 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.