[MlMt] Accessing MailMate mail database

Sherif Soliman sherif at ssoliman.com
Tue May 19 21:05:32 EDT 2015


Hello MM list,

Does anyone know if it's possible to access MailMate's database** - the 
one that contains all the metadata about emails that it manages?

I'd really like to be able to access my email data so I can analyze / 
visualize things I'm interested in. As an example, see Stephen Wolfram's 
personal analytics post:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

I've been able to collect and visualize a lot of my personal data so far 
(keystrokes, todos, messages, IMs, daily steps, bike rides), and email 
is next on my list.

So, ideally I'd be able to have a data file (or several) in some kind of 
format (csv, JSON, XML, ...), with all the basic headers/metadata:
- from
- to
- cc
- date
- subject line

Less ideally it would be a database in some readable but non-standard 
format and I'd have to do my own parsing with regex or other gymnastics.

_Least_ ideally is that I would have to write a script that would go 
through all the directories in `~/Library/Application 
Support/MailMate/Messages/...` and scrape/analyze each single .eml file 
in each single directory. That would be very IO heavy and seems like a 
waste since MailMate has already done that for itself. That is the last 
resort, but I'd like to not have to do that.

Any tips?

Thanks!

Sherif

** Safely of course. As in, I'd copy it somewhere where the original 
that MM depends on is untouched.


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