All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Mail::Miner

Simon on 2002-04-08T17:32:01

This is the toy I'm working on at the moment. I'm not sure if I'll release it; I may just release the base system with none of the add-ons. But anyway, what is it?

Suppose every mail you receive gets sent through a little program before delivery. This little program does several things. It strips off any attachments, and stores them in an SQL database, adding a note to the end of the email pointing out the ID number of the attachment in the database. It also stores information about who the mail was sent from, the subject line, the date, some keywords as determined by Text::Keywords, and so on. The add-on "recogniser" modules get hold of the email and try to pull out various things - email addresses, patches, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and so on.

Eventually, you've got quite a database built up, which allows you to do something like this: % mm --detach 12345 Detaching "foo.exe" (ID 12345) from Simon Cozens

% mm --from Simon --about Perl --dated "September 2001"

ID Date Subject ---- ---------- -------------- 1 01/09/2001 This is a test Neat, huh? Those are the relatively obvious uses. Now look what else we can do. Give me all the emails which contained a patch to Audit.pm sent by Autrijus, and save the patches into separate files: % mm --from Autrijus --patch Audit.pm --detach Find me Eiko's mailing address. % mm --from Eiko --address Show me that mail I sent to Tim sometime late last year, which was something to do with GraphViz, and give me the attachment I sent to him. % mm --to Tim --about GraphViz --dated "circa October 2001" --detach Knowing the way my memory (doesn't) operate, I think this could save me vast quantities of time. :)

Shades of MH

Fletch on 2002-04-08T17:59:49

I keep my mail folders stored in mh folders at home for similar reasons. It's really nice to be able to do

$ show `pick -search perlmonks`

and find that default password when you're logging in from a new machine.

Re:Shades of MH

belg4mit on 2002-04-10T23:02:37

Just had to say: Greetings fellow n?mh user.
Don't come across them often...
in fact I didn't think anybody outside of
RAND, MIT or the University of Irvine used it.

Cool

djberg96 on 2002-04-08T18:03:11

I definitely vote for publishing it. Would you bundle it with, say, DBD::SQLite or something?