If you’re like most IT professionals, you get floods of email. Some is probably worthless, but you need to read, organize, and store all the rest. All email programs — sometimes referred to as Mail User Agents or MUAs — let you read and handle incoming mail and send new messages. Most modern MUAs have lots of handy features, but most of them are also crippled by their “one-size-fits-all” interface, with only the features that the MUA’s developers put there. (And if Microsoft wrote the MUA, you’re even more restricted by a proprietary storage format and vulnerabilities that you can’t fix yourself.)
There’s no one “perfect” solution for every email user, from casual to pro. So, in this article, we won’t try to choose one. Instead, we’ll help you make a system that fits you. By learning the fundamentals of how email is transmitted, received, edited, and stored, you can build your own custom solution. Or, if you use an “off-the-shelf” package, you’ll still be able to understand what’s going on “under the hood.” Let’s dig in!
What’s in a Message?
To automate email processing, it helps to know how a message is constructed and delivered. Armed with that information, you can then parse messages, search through them, and edit them with a script or a mail-filtering system.
An email message is a series of lines of characters. It has two parts, the header and…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
