Download and extract information from emails in gmail

Question

I want to download mails from all items and do some analysis on the mails. this will probably involve 2 distinct components.

1. download the mails using IMAP
2. parse unstructured data in the emails to extract information from them. no - its no the usual extract email adresses from the mails. probably quite a bit more complex than that.

i imagine a step involved would be converting it from MIME format to pure text. the parsing can probably be done after dumping all the emails into a database, but i dont want to lose any formatting or attachments present in the mail.

i would prefer to do it in .net, but am open to the best language tools available for the kind of work involved. have heard that perl is probably the best option for this kind of analysis.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

I actually just finished up a project very similar to this. I used WebDAV and .Net to accomplish this. I actually found a post on SO that was very very helpful: Read MS Exchange email in C#