Re: [Evolution-hackers] extracting email to structured text (csv)

[Reid Thompson <reid thompson ateb com>]

Reid Thompson wrote:
> Tobias Mueller wrote:
> > Hey Simon :)
> >
> > On 18.06.2008 19:52 simon le bayon wrote:
> > > I'm a sociology phd student, with few competences in it, and i'd like to
> > > extract thousands of email from evolution to a csv or other structured
> > > file.
> > I don't know whether mbox or maildir is structered enough and whether 
> > Evolution supports copy&paste old mails to a new mbox account. But if 
> > both facts are given, you might want to create a new mbox (or maildir) 
> > account, copy&paste your mails into that accout, so that all mails are 
> > in the mbox file and mess around with your data.
> >
> > HTH,
> >   Tobi
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Evolution-hackers mailing list
> > Evolution-hackers gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
>
> rubymail, or one of the other ruby mail libraries may allow you to do 
> what you want..
>
> http://www.rfc20.org/rubymail/docs/
>
> http://www.rfc20.org/rubymail/
>
> rubymail has a parse_mbox call that might allow what you want...
>
> found this on the web... might be modifiable for what you want.
>
> #!/usr/bin/ruby -w
> # Split a mbox file into $year-$month files
> # Copyright (C) 2008 Joerg Jaspert
> # BSD style license, on Debian see /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD
> require 'pathname'
> require 'rmail'
> count = 0
> File.open(Pathname.new(ARGV[0]), 'r') do  mbox
>   RMail::Mailbox.parse_mbox(mbox) do  raw
>     count += 1
>     print "# count  mails\n"
>     begin
>
> File.open(RMail::Parser.read(raw).header.date.strftime("split/mail-%y%m"), 
> 'a') do  out
>         out.print(raw)
>       end
>     rescue NoMethodError
>       print "Couldn't parse date header, ignoring broken spam mail\n"
>     end
>   end
> end

ruby tmail is also very nice.  it should allow you to do what you want.

http://tmail.rubyforge.org/reference/index.html notes that it recognizes mbox, 
maildir, etc.