automating email responses with python

[John Roth]

"Sandy Norton" <sandskyfly at hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:b03e80d.0212072205.4ffe3a02 at posting.google.com...
> Hi folks,
>
> I have a terrible problem responding to emails in the 'expected' time
> frame. I think I'm always late (whatever that means) and I usually
> have to apologize for responding non-immediately. So... I've been
> thinking about an application, written in python of course, that would
> preprocess one's emails and do some of the work that one usually does
> prior to responding.
>
> Here is a silly example:
>
> I receive an email that is essentially a request for a document of
> some sort... my preprocessor somehow understands this and parses the
> email to a set of elements (one of which is a document), it
> preemptively searches my harddrive for the document and then composes
> an appropriate response with the assumed document as an attachment. I
> then accept the respone as is, or do a minor tweak to make it
> suitable.
>
> Is this a something that can be addressed with software, or should I
> just focus on my response time...
>
> cheers to all,
>
> Sandy

It mostly depends on how structured your e-mail is. If the format
is pretty much the same for document requests, then the packages
that have been recommended should get the skeleton of what you
want. You'd still need to process the message somehow to get
the requested document name and so forth...

John Roth