Best email program for OSX from which to export text

[FoxyKaye]

Hi all,

This may sound a little strange, but our nonprofit has some information that gets sent in via its Web site and is emailed to folks around the office. Generally, these emails contain addresses and phone numbers of whom is downloading various pieces of literature and the occasional survey.

So, for the past year or so, these emails have been collecting on computers around the office and we just started a process by which we hope to standardize their recipients and format. My question is this: which email client on OS X has the best capability to export messages it has received into some form of text document, Eudora, Mail (Apple), or Entourage (M$)? I know Eudora has an export function, but is there something better in either Mail or Entourage. The goal here is to then convert the text document into some form of delineated text that can be picked up by a spreadsheet or database program for some rudimentary analysis and picking up contact information.

I know that we could connect the information coming in from our Web site to a SQL server and database, but that unfortunately requires dollars, time, and expertise we don't have.

So, for the moment we're trying to improvise a solution with what we have on hand. Any thoughts on what email client is best with regard to exporting text from the emails it receives?

Thanks!

 

[mkrishnan]

Just an idea, but with Mail, mailboxes are actually stored as big text files with all the attachments in MIME.

What you could do in principle is use the e-mail header as a tag for a new message, to let a database program part out all the messages. Unfortunately, I'm not sure every header is uniform enough to allow this. And every e-mail starts with a header, so they're all there.

There might actually be a control code there too, not sure.

You'll know its working right bc when it works, you'll have the same number of messages as you do in Mail.

Do you want to pull people's addresses and phone numbers out of it? If you come up with a search algorithm, I guess you don't really even need to make DB entries out of the e-mails before you do that. But it sounds like it could get hairy.