What I Want to Do: Be able to study the time distribution of the arrival in my Inbox of newsletters to which I subscribe.

Current Situation: I subscribe to 3 newsletters about which I receive a summary email 6 or 7 days per week. For years these summary emails would arrive at predictable times: 1:00 am local time (America/New York) for newsletters originating in Australia or the U.K.; 8:00 am local time for a newsletter originating in the U.S.A.

In the last 6 months the arrival times of these summary emails (which I believe use a common technology) have become very erratic -- as much as 16 to 24 hours later than normal. Since I am an active commenter on these newsletters, this is annoying.

One of the 3 newsletters has already begun moving to a different distribution technology. I would like to encourage the other 2 newsletters to do likewise. To that end, I would like to provide them with data about the actual arrival times in my Inbox of their summary emails.

I use Thunderbird as my email client to Pobox's IMAP server. I need to get the data out of Thunderbird and into a plain-text format (probably CSV) so that I can write Perl code to analyze it. (In a later stage, I will need to locate CPAN modules that will enable me to, say, create a scatter-point diagram with which to display the message arrival time data.)

What I Already Know How to Do:

• On my laptop I can locate the following directory: ~/.thunderbird/NNNNNN.default/ImapMail/mail.pobox.com. In that directory I can see, among other files, INBOX and INBOX.msf, where the latter is some type of SELECT query.
• In Thunderbird's GUI I can create a Saved Search Folder with all instances of a given newsletter. However, when I go to the corresponding .msf file, I see that that file merely holds the SELECT query -- when what I want is the results of the SELECT query as they would be displayed graphically in Thunderbird.

Has anyone faced this problem previously who can point me toward a way to get the data out of Thunderbird and into a plain-text file?

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