Thunderbird
From Dar
[edit]
Accessing raw text data from Thunderbird email folders.
Thunderbird is an open source email client but it doesn't have a "summarise" function. The workaround allows data from individual emails in one folder to be accessed as a single plain text file, by navigating to that file using the computer's operating system, which in this case is Mac OSX but could also be Windows or Linux.
With all the data in one place, it is then possible to subject it to an Emergent Coding Analysis process.
Excerpt from future report:
- "I had arranged for emails from my principal web based account to be forwarded to an installed pop3 email client - Mozilla Thunderbird. This allowed me to sort and filter the messages into their own folder, but offers no obvious way to concaternate or summarise a series of individual mails into one piece of text, as I required.
- Plain text
- In the end I discovered that Thunderbird stores its data in a raw text format using the filesystem of the client computer, rather than a single binary database or anything proprietary and undecipherable like that, so the breakthrough came about by navigating the file system of the installed client program using the Finder program of the native OS, finding the file in which represented the folder into which I had organised the emails, and then simply open that file with a basic text editor. All that remains is to strip out the easily identified headers, and then paste into the personal wiki document for processing."
