Is it possible to programmatically 'clean' emails?

Question

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can clean the body of incoming emails? I want to strip out disclaimers, images and maybe any previous email text that may be als

Answer 1

A few obvious things to look at:

1. if the mail is anything but pure plain text, the message will be multi-part mime. Any part whose type is "image/*" (image/jpeg, etc), can probably be dropped. In all likelyhood any part whose type is not "text/*" can go.
2. A HTML message will probably have a part of type "multipart/alternative" (I think), and will have 2 parts, one "text/plain" and one "text/html". The two parts should be just about equivalent, so you can drop the HTML part. If the only part present is the HTML bit, you may have to do a HTML to plain text conversion.
3. The usual format for quoted text is to precede the text by a ">" character. You should be able to drop these lines, unless the line starts ">From", in which case the ">" has been inserted to prevent the mail reader from thinking that the "From " is the start of a new mail.
4. The signature should start with "-- \r\n", though there is a very good chance that the trailing space will be missing.