Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 02:45:23 -0500
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Subject: Re: Fw: No Direct Vanagon Content
In-Reply-To: <002601bf6d3a$3bed4740$57580440@Pangea.ca>
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Ah Ha! What you want is a program that understands 1) the Outlook database
format and 2) the Internet mail header format; and 3) the format that you
want the output in. You also may want the equivalent of a mail-reading
program to let you retrieve the saved messages in some orderly way (which
in itself implies *some* sort of header. Otherwise you're going to be
paging through a great big text file looking for the part you want. And if
you convert it to a Word document it will be bigger -- I just took a 140K
mail file and saved it as a Word doc, came out 254K.
Your choices are 1) find a program that someone else has written that does
what you want. Ask around, search the shareware archives and so forth. I
wouldn't rate the chances as very good, but there may be something out
there. 2) Hire a programmer to write it -- forget it unless you're
independently wealthy. Could easily cost thousands of dollars. 3) Write
the program yourself. The Perl language might very well do what you want,
and it's readily available. I think it's free. The job could undoubtedly
be done in C or C++ if for some reason Perl (or Python) wouldn't do
it. You might be able to write a Word macro that would do what you want --
that would assume that you can get chunks of messages into Word
somehow. If Word can use regular expressions for search and replace, it
shouldn't have much trouble dealing with header lines. Basically if you
remove everything from "Received:" to the next empty line you will have
gotten rid of the header. Of course that will also include From: and
Subject: which you might want to keep, and they don't always turn up in the
same place in the header (although stuff from gerry is probably consistent).
OR
4) you can get a bigger disk and don't worry about the size. Staples is
selling 20 gigabyte Maxtor drives for about $150 right now. 4G drives are
around $100 and you'll likely have trouble finding one smaller than that,
unless it's for a laptop.
Personally I'd go with #4, unless you need a project to learn programming on.
cheers
david
At 10:57 PM 2/1/2000 -0600, Roy O. wrote:
>Volks,
>By the responses to my post, it appears I haven't made myself clear....I
>wish to
>remove the header info and other unnecessary/redundant information from each
>saved message, not simply move each message to various sub-folders. This
>categorisation into numerous sub-folders does not reduce the space occupied by
>the accumulation of postings, which is what I mean to do.
David Beierl - Providence, RI
http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"
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