I subscribe to the digest versions of ActiveState's perl related mailing lists e.g. PerlWin32-Admin, PerlWin32-Database, PerlWin32-User etc. Some of these digests are relatively high volume and so result in about 50 msgs per digest per day.

There are often mail threads in these digests which can span anything from 1 digest to n digests.

At the moment, I extract mails of interest using a text editor and bung them into a directory. If the mail is part of a thread, I have to manually find other parts of that thread and store them together etc. It can get messy quickly and is also very time consuming.

Given (e.g.) a directory of email digests (each digest is saved as a text file), how can I:

(1) Scan through this directory of digests

(2) Build up a list of different digests

(3) Build up a list of threads that are in/span these digests

(4) Ask the user which thread(s) they want to "export"

(5) "Export" these selected threads as a separate textfile, with one thread per new textfile

It seems to me all this could be done in Perl, although I don't have the faintest clue how to start something like this! :-)

Has anyone written anything that can do what I've described above? If you have had the "retaining favourite threads" problem yourself, how did you solve it?

dmtelf