I have a mailbox with bout 1000 emails in. All of the emails are from
people who have requested a copy of a children's health newsletter I
publish.

I want to extract all the email addresses and the contents of their
email message and dump this information into a database. I currently use
FileMaker 7 on a Mac.

Can any on the list help me automate this process?

Thanks,

Rich

"Rich Sagall" <rich.sagall (AT) pobox (DOT) com> wrote

OK, I haven't done a lot of text parsing but... you're looking for the @
character and then the space prior to the address and the space after the
address.

Whether you do that in FileMaker or something else is a different question.

My first cut attempt would be to have a text field, then import the
Eudora.mbx into the field - as there are a lot of returns through .mbx file,
you'll end up with stacks of records. Now find the records that have the @
symbol included, and throw the rest away. Now have some fun writing a parse
algorithm that does the first thing above.

Cheers

Webko

In article <1gh8amp.1vgwr2r1l35klyN%rich.sagall (AT) pobox (DOT) com>,
rich.sagall (AT) pobox (DOT) com (Rich Sagall) wrote:


If you're confident playing in MacOS X's Terminal, then this might
point you in the right direction:

If you have a Linux or UNIX box handy, then you can use the
following grep command to extract all sender addresses from
a Eudora mailbox (MBX) file:


grep "^From: " mailbox.mbx | cut -f 2 -d ":" | grep '@' |
sed -e "s/^ //" | sort | uniq > addresslist.txt


This command will save the sender's address as-is.




The FileMaker approach would be something like this ...

1. First, in Eudora you need to make sure that any deleted
messages are actually gone from the mailbox. In MacOS 9 and
Eudora 6.1 this is done by simply clicking on the numbers /
sizes listed at the bottom of the mailbox window (eg. 1/3/9K/0K).
Once that's done the last number should show 0K and you can then
quit Eudora.


2. Next, in FileMaker Pro, create a new database with only two
fields:
MailText Text field

EmailAddress Calculation field (Text result)
= Left(Right(Test, Length(Test)-14),
Length(Right(Test, Length(Test)-14))-1)

Put both fields on a layout.


3. Choose Import Records from the File menu and open the appropriate
Eudora mailbox file. In MacOS 9.2 this is stored in the
folder found at:
System Folder > Eudora Folder > Mail Folder > {mailbox name}

In MacOS X you should be able to use the Finder to search for
the mailbox name.


4. Click on the Import button and wait for FileMaker to import all
the data. For 1,000 emails it could take a while, especially if
the actual message text is long.


5. Once that's finished enter Find mode and type the following
into the MailText field:
"Return-Path"

Processing the Find should then give you one record for each
email (ie. 1,000).


6. You can either export the EmailAddress field to a text file or
import it directly into the database you've created to store all
the addresses in.


You could make EmailAddress a normal Text field with an Auto-enter
Calculation instead. That way you can import the mailbox (making sure
to perform the auto-enter options) and then simply delete all the
records that are NOT "Return-Path", leaving you with the only the
emails. Then delete the MailText field, turn off the auto-enter
calculation, and use this database to store the addresses. But with
1000 emails you initially have a large number of records, so you'd be
best to Save As the database as a Compressed Copy to get rid of the
excess space the deleted records took up.




Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)