Graphing Email

March 6, 2005 9:08 PM

I'd like to graph a large database of email (tracking the amount of email received per day from a variety of addresses over several years), ideally in MS Excel. The data is currently in Entourage 2004 for the Mac. Thoughts?
posted by boombot to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Use AppleScript; I think this should work (you can adjust the variables for this based on what info you need from Entourage — open Entourage's "dictionary" in Script Editor):

do script "touch emailExtraction.csv"
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"

-- get the currently selected message or messages

set selectedMessages to current messages

-- if there are no messages selected, warn the user and then quit
if selectedMessages is {} then
display dialog "Please select a message first and then run this script." with icon 1
return
end if

repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages
set theEmailAddress to sender of theMessage
set theEmailAddress to text returned of theEmailAddress as string
do script "cat emailExtraction.csv >> " & theEmailAddress & "'\\r' '\\n'"
end repeat

end tell

Put this script in your Documents -> Microsoft User Data -> Entourage Script Menu Items folder
posted by AlexReynolds at 9:30 PM on March 6, 2005

(This generates a CSV file you can open in Excel.)
posted by AlexReynolds at 10:55 PM on March 6, 2005