this problem has been on my mind for so long, I have not come up with a solution so I ask the community. So much of my life is in email messages (I guess it is true for others too), and I am not quite satisfied with the way email clients let you organize/archive the messages. Considering how common emails are (I use them all day for private and working activities), it makes me crazy to think that I cannot, for example, select all emails coming from a person and format them into a Word/LaTeX document!
My aim is to ‘manipulate’ emails messages with much more freedom and ease, converting and editing them, grouping them in text files, and to be able to choose a way of storing them that is not the predefined function in most clients (using Mac Mail, for example, you get an ARCHIVE.mbox file that I hate because messages are ‘locked’ in there rather than stored for subsequent use).
I am a good Java programmer, so I checked the JavaMail API. I am able to send messages (well, there are tons of ready examples online), but what I want to achieve is a more sophisticated manipulation of the objects ‘message’. Do you think that JavaMail, with its learning curve, is the way to go? Should I embark on another programming language? As far as I could see, there is nothing ready out there (which is shocking to me: am I the only one wanting to text-edit her messages?).
Thank you very much for any answer! F
Check out the Apache James that provides higher level API for email manipulation.