in reply to Parsing a Pine mailbox

Which I think would work, but how slow is it going to be?

Not slow enough to matter. If you're only going to be running this script once, it doesn't matter if it takes an hour to complete. Write it in a way that will save the most of your time.

No need to worry about details of efficiency unless you're working on something that is going to be used often. Remember that your time is worth more than the computer's.