Re: How do you filter the email headers you read from an email folder?

[Steve Rosen <stevenmichaelrosen gmail com>]

Hi,

I haven't received any replies to this request for information - can
anyone possibly help to answer it?

Thank you,
Steve Rosen

Steve Rosen wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have developed a nice little console application that can monitor the
> incoming emails for some folder (in this case, just the inbox folder for
> now) - it uses the TinyMail library to do the brunt of the work.
>
> Here's my question - Is there any way to provide a filter that will limit
> the headers that are retrieved from the email server?
>
> For example, a lot of people will have an inbox folder that has, 
> literally,
> thousands and thousands of messages (going back many years, in some 
> cases) -
> my current strategy is to simply retrieve all the headers, and before 
> I try
> to save off anything that I care about, I make sure the date in the 
> header
> is greater than some specified date in the past (for example, one 
> month ago).
>
> But - if the inbox folder I am monitoring has thousands and thousands of
> emails, I will receive thousands and thousands of email headers, and only
> choose to keep a few dozen (or, however many were sent in just the 
> last month).
>
> So I'm looking for some way, using the TinyMail APIs, to provide that 
> filtering
> at a lower level, i.e., make sure that my little device (which wants 
> to keep
> bandwidth to an absolute minimum) only tries to retrieve email headers 
> from
> the server that are not older than (in this example) just one month 
> from today.
>
> Is this possible?  If so, how?
>
> To be a bit more specific about what I am doing, I have a newly 
> created folder
> monitoring object ("TnyConsoleFolderMonitor") - and when its update 
> method gets
> called, it checks to see if it's the FIRST time it is being called - 
> in this
> special first-time case, it then calls the 
> "tny_folder_get_headers_async" method,
> which will retrieve ALL the headers of the inbox folder I am monitoring.
>
> On subsequent calls, it calls the "tny_folder_change_get_changed" 
> method to
> see if there are any ADDED headers and/or EXPUNGED headers, and then 
> calls
> the appropriate methods ("tny_folder_change_get_added_headers" method 
> and/or
> "tny_folder_change_get_expunged_headers" method) to get the list of 
> newly added
> headers and/or the list of newly expunged headers.  Of course, once 
> we're past
> that the point of receiving the initial email headers, these 
> report-by-exception
> methods are great, since you just get the NEW information about the 
> folder that
> has changed.
>
> My problem is that first-time, initial setting up of the emails that 
> are in
> the inbox folder I am monitoring - I really don't want the device to 
> be getting
> thousands and thousands of headers from the email server - this 
> represents a
> large amount of bandwidth (potentially) - and certainly slows up the 
> time that
> the user will be able to look at their list of email messages.  We 
> will, of
> course, allow the user to define just how far back they want us to go 
> when
> retrieving emails - the default will be something like one month - and 
> if the
> user wants to see, for example, up to one year's worth of emails from 
> their
> email account, we'll allow them to do this, with ample warnings that 
> their
> device will be gobbling up XXX amount of extra bandwidth to give them 
> that
> extra backlog of email messages.
>
> Thank you in advance for any help that you can provide on this issue.
>
> - Steve Rosen