Personal Email Archiving

I read in CamWorld recently that Cameron had kept all his incoming email, pretty much forever. I've never done that, personally, but the idea sort of appealed to me.

He went on to talk about plans for putting all his incoming email messages in a database. I thought that was cool too.

So I did it.

The best part is that the tools are all freely available. I wrote a procmail filter to send my mail through a neat little Python script, which posts them to a mySQL database. My quick-and-dirty front-end is in PHP3, though it could really be done with any of a number of tools.

For the time being, I'm not putting too much smarts into it. On Kendall's advice, I'm using Python's rfc822 module to parse the "from" and "subject" headers out, so I can search and sort messages by sender or subject. I'm storing all of the headers and the full body text in the database, so I can do more complex things with them in the future.

Next up: email-based posting of articles to Monkeyfist.