At one company I worked we have a mailbox for suggestion with websites that had 'adult' material and one mailbox for spam mail that should be blocked.
Once I began working I was in 'charge' of this 'gracious' jobs.
Checking it there was something like 2000 unread mails to block and 4000 spam mails to block too.
Of course that is a function to be automatized and I looked for a good solution for me.
What I did:
[1] Used python IMAP to connect to Exchange server
[2] Used beatifulsoup (python) to parse the href values inside the email
[3] After that send a email 'thanking' the user for its collaboration (very important)
Three days after my boss thanked me for the great effort I was doing answering all the e-mails and that we got compliments. Because NOW we are answering back the customers. (not me the script)
Ok. now lets do a plan
- Check the imap python module [1], and after take one tutorial using ssl imap4 [4]
- Decide What is best for YOUR problem? Download the emails (pop3) or search and browse it at server (IMAP).
- CHECK if you can connect using the protocols IMAP4 or POP3 Before, exchange is buggy in this part please check this bug report too [3]
- Ok, you are sure you can connect using IMAP4 or POP3, now fetch one message and parse it with beatiful soup or lxml. (my case I looked for href and 'mailto:')
- Do a nice message using the field 'from:' the email making it personal
- PROFIT
[1] google it imap python
[2] google it BeautifulSoup python
[3] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296387
[4] http://yuji.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/python-imaplib-imap-example-with-gmail/
Sorry but I had to give the google urls because of my low score.
I hope this answer give you some good pointers to your solution.
Of course you can make it more hax0r using lxml, sending the data to a DB.
But after you connect and start manipulating you can do anything :)
