Is there a way to pull the specific information from a consistently formatted email into something like Delicious Library?

November 13, 2005 10:02 AM

Is there a way to pull specific information (like title/author) from a consistently formatted email into something like Delicious Library?

I subscribe to several library, bookstore, and recommendation emails for new reading. Ultimately i want to have a shelf of suggested books that I could just open up Delicious and browse and adapt as I wanted.

posted by nramsey to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

what operating system are you using?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:13 AM on November 13, 2005

andrew cooke: FYI, Delicious Library is a Mac OSX-only application.
posted by jeresig at 10:23 AM on November 13, 2005

Response by poster: Sorry, should have specified Mac.
posted by nramsey at 10:40 AM on November 13, 2005

Delicious Monster is AppleScriptable I believe. Not sure how to get an AppleScript to run every time an email arrives but you could set up a manual script to process the email and then insert the items into Delicious Monster.
posted by schwa at 10:42 AM on November 13, 2005

oh, ok, thanks.

since osx is a unix, you should be able to use the standard mail processing tool, called procmail. however, doing a google search for procmail and delicios library doesn't turn up anything useful and procmail is probably too complicated for you to get working on your own.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:45 AM on November 13, 2005

Applescript can twist the body of an email into just about any shape you want. Unfortunately, I don't see how to add the information to Delicious Library with any commands in its script Dictionary.

Perhaps you could create a folder of URL's in Safari instead?

Now you've got me thinking. I'm going to try and make something that works.
posted by Crosius at 10:49 AM on November 13, 2005

Response by poster: I was thinking i could place them into a tickler file in my GTD TIddlyWiki also, but Delicious Library is just so darn cute and it would pull the synopsis when available if i can provide the title/author.

I guess what are my options for pulling specifc information out and placing it into ANY other format?
posted by nramsey at 10:57 AM on November 13, 2005

Using this snippet of applescript (not efficient):

tell application "Mail"
get selection as list
get item 1 of result
get content of result
set Raw_Text to result
end tell

You can create a text dump of the selected email.

Then you can use text delimiters based on your message layout to split out book titles, or even better, ISBN numbers as a list.

If you output this list as a tab-delimited file, Delicious Library can import the file to a shelf - but it doesn't look like you can automate this step.
posted by Crosius at 11:44 AM on November 13, 2005