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

In reply to Keeping favourite threads from mailing list emailsdigests by dmtelf

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.