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

Version 3 of OSBF-Lua has a mail-parsing library that will handle the MIME and split a message into its MIME parts and so on. I currently have a mess of Lua scripts that do stuff like ignore most non-text attachments, prefer plain text to HTML, and so on. (I also wrap long lines to 80 characters while trying to preserve quoting.)

As far as removing previously quoted mail, the suggestions above are all good (you must subscribe to some ill-mannered mailing lists).

Removing disclaimers reliably is probably going to be hard. My first cut would be simply to maintain a library of disclaimers that would be stripped off the end of each mail message; I would write a script to make it easy for me to add to the library. For something more sophisticated I would try some kind of machine learning.

I've been working on spam filtering since Feb 2007 and I've learned that anything to do with email is a mess. A good rule of thumb is that whatever you want to do is a lot harder than you think it is :-(