Mail and text extraction

[Steve Holden]

"Dino Levy" <dino_levy at mindlessSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.04.21.22.56.47.757048.1444 at mindlessSPAM.com...
> On Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:52:11 +0200, Peter Hansen wrote:
> > Oh, it's quite achievable that way.  It's just the wrong way to do it.
> >
> > Mixing in the various operations like that is a form of optimization,
> > and since nothing's actually working yet it's clearly premature, and
> > therefore not good. :-)
>
> Hehe, I certainly agree with this one... But I like to do such things,
> like polishing the code while it does not yet exist, or make hundreds of
> new options DURING the programming. That's why many of my programs never
> see the daylight:)
>
> > MIME and POP3 are orthogonal.  MIME is an encoding, POP3 is a transport
> > protocol (or something).  You can have one, or the other, or both, or
> > neither...
> >
> > By the way, the "quite achievable" part above simply means you could
> > easily build this capability into custom software.  The "wrong way" just
> > means that would likely be a large waste of time, given that the
> > individual pieces already exist in standard modules, quite well tested
> > and debugged.  Just combine them in appropriate ways and keep life
> > simple.
> >
> > -Peter
>
> Sooorry, Mea culpa. I overlooked your sentence and wrote it
> automatically. I was actually thinking about IMAP. I don't want IMAP, I
> want POP3. Sorry.
> I'm going to experiment with this downloading the message first and then
> parsing it method...

Also don't forget that any solution that breaks the socket link with the
POP3 server in an uncontrolled manner will likely leave that mailbox locked
for some unspecified period, which might not be what you want.

regards
--
Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                 http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/