BIG e-mail dilemma that is costing me precious time!

kerer99 · #1 (**permalink**) 02-06-2006, 10:34 AM

I have received form submissions from a website that have the name, e-mail, and country in the body of the form submission e-mail. When I export these e-mails as a tab-delimited file in Outlook 2000, it exports them into a messy excel file - the 3 fields in the body of the e-mail are not seperated into columns.

Does anyone know of any utilities that could take these existing e-mails and parse them? Again, I would be looking for all data in the e-mails to be stripped, except for the name, e-mail, and country fields, and be placed into an excel document with the 3 fields in 3 seperate columns, or in a tab delimited file.

I believe I am looking for an "e-mail parser" - one that could parse existing e-mails.

Little help? P-L-E-A-S-E?

Faglork · #2 (**permalink**) 02-07-2006, 12:45 PM

Why don't you just save it to a file on your server?
Would be much easier. Write it semi-colon-delimited like

name;e-mail;country;
name;e-mail;country;
name;e-mail;country;
...

and download it regularly.

hth,
faglork

ADAM Web Design · #3 (**permalink**) 02-07-2006, 12:49 PM

Better yet, why not write it to a database file, which would allow you the option to expand the file to include other things if/when you wanted to?

kerer99 · #4 (**permalink**) 02-07-2006, 01:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Faglork

Why don't you just save it to a file on your server?
Would be much easier. Write it semi-colon-delimited like

name;e-mail;country;
name;e-mail;country;
name;e-mail;country;
...

and download it regularly.

hth,
faglork

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Better yet, why not write it to a database file, which would allow you the option to expand the file to include other things if/when you wanted to?

lol, yes, that would be GREAT, but my lack of programming skills really doesn't help...

You know, I think it's time for me to outsource - there's only so much one person can do.

In the meantime though I have over 2000 e-mail submissions sitting in my inbox that need to be sorted. I've created a bit of a nightmare for myself here.

How much do you think it would cost to hire someone to create a system to write form submissions to a database, and input existing e-mails to a database?

Faglork · #5 (**permalink**) 02-13-2006, 10:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kerer99

How much do you think it would cost to hire someone to create a system to write form submissions to a database,

depends on how user-friendly this has to be. Just additionally writing data into a MySQL database is rather cheap - however, you would have to handle exports by tools like PHPMyAdmin.

If you want a full-blown user interface, it can get expensive.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kerer99

and input existing e-mails to a database?

There are existing 3rd-party-solutions, some of them can be found at
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/housekeeping.htm

Before you try any of these, DON'T FORGET to make a backup!

hth,
faglork

SoloSEO · #6 (**permalink**) 02-14-2006, 07:01 AM

I've used a program called 'Batch Keyword Cleaner' to do the same thing you're wanting. There is a bit of work involved though since it wasn't designed for this purpose. It's one short-coming for this job is that it can't remove sequential time, you'll have to remove that manually if you have it in your file.