Tool or method to parse an incoming e mail, strip the data and push into a database

Question

are there any tools available that will automatically parse an incoming e mail to a specific address, strip out the data and insert it into a SQL database?

The e mail would be coming in through exchange 2003 server and would be in a known fixed format, ie

Name: Firstname Surname
ID Number: nnnnnnn
etc.
etc.

Ideally the solution would need to operate on the server and not a client. Any advice appreciated.

I would ask this on stackoverflow since it's a scripting thing. — MathewC, Jun 26 '09 at 15:43
may I ask what you finally did to do that since the question was asked 4 years ago? — Nicolas Manzini, Jun 06 '13 at 16:59

moshen · Answer 1 · 2009-06-26T16:03:15.510

I've always seen this kind of thing done with a little bit of glue code. A little perl would work for this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Net::POP3;
use DBI;

my $pop = Net::POP3->new('mail.server.com') or
        die "shit, I can't connect\n";

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:databasename', 'username', 'password'
               ) || die "Could not connect to database: $DBI::errstr";


if ($pop->login( 'username' , 'pass' ) > 0) {
    my $msgnums = $pop->list;
    MESSAGE: foreach my $msgnum (keys %$msgnums) {
        my $msg = $pop->get($msgnum);

        my ( $firstName, $lastName, $idNum );

        if( $msg =~ /^Name:\s+([a-zA-Z]+)\s+([a-zA-Z]+)/){
            $firstName = $1;
            $lastName = $2;
        }
        if ( $msg =~ /^ID Number:\s+([0-9]+)/ ){
            $idNum = $1;
        }

        $dbh->do('INSERT INTO exmpl_tbl VALUES( ? , ? , ?)', undef, ($firstName, $lastName, $idNum));

        $pop->delete($msgnum);
        next MESSAGE;

    }
}

$pop->quit;
exit 0;

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 26 '09 at 15:58

There is a commercial software, which seems to do that:

Email2DB

Read and process messages from POP3, IMAP & Microsoft Exchange Servers

[...]

Easy extraction of any number of fields from the subject, message & headers. Update any data source including, Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Access, ODBC.

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 26 '09 at 16:46

If you want to play with an open source project, have a look at Archiveopteryx (http://www.archiveopteryx.org/). It's got a really, really sweet normalized SQL-based data storage schema for email (using PostgreSQL). You could combine it with, say, "fetchmail" and POP3 server on Exchange to create an SQL-based mail archive that you could report and search against with ODBC-based reporting tools.

Tool or method to parse an incoming e mail, strip the data and push into a database

3 Answers3