Download emails to text files?

Hamster_style

Hey guys,

I'm trying to mine the word count and some other random data on all the emails I've received through a particular email account. Do you guys know of an easy and fast automated way that one can download a bunch of emails from gmail and save them as text files?

All I'm really looking for is the subject and text body, but if it's in a format like extended headers and whatnot, then that's fine too! I can just parse it and stuff.

Thanks in advance H/A dudes!

underdonk

I've had good luck with http://perldoc.perl.org/Net/POP3.html.

The code in the synopsis is almost exactly what you need, with the exception of writing the messages to a file handle instead of STDOUT and providing the application with some information it needs to work. In the (untested) example below, the first command line argument should be the address of the POP3 server, the second command line argument should be your username, and the third command line argument should be your password. The script will create a text file called messages.txt and all messages will be written (appended) to the file.

#perl get_messages.pl pop.mailserver.com batman s3cRe7l41RzFTW

get_messages.pl contains:

use Net::POP3;

$pop = Net::POP3->new($ARGV[0]);
open(MESSAGES, ">>messages.txt");

if ($pop->login($ARGV[1], $ARGV[2]) > 0) {
   my $msgnums = $pop->list;
   foreach my $msgnum (keys %$msgnums) {
     my $msg = $pop->get($msgnum);
     print MESSAGES @$msg;
     $pop->delete($msgnum);
   }
}

close(MESSAGES);
$pop->quit;

Hope this helps!

underdonk

Can't edit because I'm jailed, but I wanted to mention that this script will pull the messages directly from your mailbox on the server and delete them after they are downloaded (when the connection to the server is closed). If you don't want to delete them and leave them available for download later, comment out or delete the below line from the script.

$pop->delete($msgnum);

Hamster_style

This looks perfect, thank you so much!