Re: E-mail to Database (Oracle 8i)

Jeremy Ovenden <newsposter_at_hazelweb.co.uk> writes:

> Thanks for the thoughts - seems pretty complex!! I had wondered about a
> tool called procmail for the o/s side of stuff and wanted to see if
> anyone would mention it. I was probably thinking lower-level, something
> like procmail then sqlloader (using cron) then pl/sql package running
> under dbms_job.
>
> Whether procmail is the tool for the job I don't know, more research
> required!

Procmail might be useful in the sorting stage and passing the relevant e-mail messages to some other filter, but you are going to need some other filter/processing to extract/break-up the mail message (especially when mime is involved).

Procmail itself is really just a very powerful delivery agent - you can use it to sort your mail into different boxes based on the mail headers and you can use it to pipe a message to another program etc, but I don't think its sophisticated enough to be able to process the messages themselves. I'm assuming you would want to extract the message and maybe one or two headers, but yu won't want to store all the headers (e.g. Received-by, Message-id, X-* etc). You would also need to break up mime attachments and probably avoid storing multipart mail when the parts simply represent the text and html versions of the same message etc.

However, combining procmail and something like perl and you would be able to come up with some very sophisticated processing. Perl has many modules for handling mail messages/folders and various mime types etc.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
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