How do I automate the reading of emails?
I get a lot of emails and want to create a script or program to automate the reading and scanning for information in these emails. Any suggestions other than digging into the various databases where the information is stored?
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What would you look for to identify an interesting or useful message? As put, it sounds like a non-trivial AI challenge.
I would be looking for key words or phrases deemed important by the group.
It might be a trivial AI challenge if I had experience with AI, however, I do not. I also want to know what the database format is so I could query that. Is there an easier way to do it?
There are Message Filters available to you, and you can add the abilty to use regular expressions in these. FiltaQuilla and Expression Search/GmailUI may be useful.
The "database" is based on mbox but I don't think parsing this would be an easy option. It is not wholly man-readable, being a near-verbatim record of the email messages as received, and message text may be encoded in a variety of ways. You'd need to be aware of mime and consequently what do with Base 64 etc. Some clients routinely use HTML-formatted wrapped up in Base 64.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME