MathGroup Archive 2005

[Date Index] [Thread Index] [Author Index]

Search the Archive

Re: Re: IMAP interface to Mathematica

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg61755] Re: [mg61708] Re: IMAP interface to Mathematica
  • From: Chris Chiasson <chris.chiasson at gmail.com>
  • Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:25:38 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <djn8lc$l3n$1@smc.vnet.net> <200510270901.FAA19351@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Thanks to jwz, we now have proof that Mathematica is a useful tool :-]

On 10/27/05, Steven T. Hatton <hattons at globalsymmetry.com> wrote:
> Yves Papegay wrote:
>
> > Has anyone around some experience in using Mathematica for connecting to
> > an IMAP mail server and for automatic processing of mails ?
> >
> > I plan/need to work on it and I would like to avoid unnecessary effort.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Yves
>
> If I were you, I would break the problem down into separate pieces.
> Mathematica (IMO) should know nothing about email, per se.  It should
> simply know how to handle a request to process a particular type of data.
> There are plenty of tool kits for creating IMAP clients which you can use
> to create the IMAP side of the interface.  Figure out what you want
> Mathematica to do with the data, and how to provide the data to Mathematica
> in a friendly form (strip off all the header unnecessary header stuff
> (unless that's what you are processing) and send just the body, or relevant
> part of the body to Mathematica.  I'm sure there are tools which can take a
> typical mail message and represent it as an object (C++, or lesser). That
> should enable you to grab only what you need from the message without doing
> a lot of your own coding.
>
> I will note that this situation provides anticdotal evidence supporting
>
> http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
>
> Zawinski's Law
>
>     ?Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs
> which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.? Coined by Jamie
> Zawinski (who called it the ?Law of Software Envelopment?) to express his
> belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into
> toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a
> side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying
> degrees of accuracy.
> --
> "Philosophy is written in this grand book, The Universe. ... But the book
> cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language...
> in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, ...;
> without which wanders about in a dark labyrinth."   The Lion of Gaul
>
>


--
http://chrischiasson.com/contact/chris_chiasson


  • Prev by Date: Re: Re: Running the kernel command line with additional input files
  • Next by Date: Still bug in Random
  • Previous by thread: Re: IMAP interface to Mathematica
  • Next by thread: Re: ParametricPlot3D