take the Email Challenge!

[danielle]

i tried to give an exciting title to hopefully lure all the smarties in here to help out...

On a project tracking application...

Emails are automatically sent to all project members when an individual member uploads a file or adds a comment. The user who recieves the message can send a reply message via email, that will post a follow-up comment that's attached to either the file uploaded or general comments.

The message comes in with an identifier within the subject line so, as long as they don't delete the subject - it writes to the database just fine. (if they remove the identifier - triggers and error and they get a notification email.)

All works fine now -- only thing is, unless I make the users put some delimiter at the end of their reply, all the original email's text is in there too.

I want it to be as simple as possible for the end user so would prefer to not have any directions for them - just reply and send. Problem is -- some emails have the "----Original Email----" w/ the headers, some have just the original email body, some have nothing... Seems like it's all mainly user preferences within their own email clients...

The Challenge... is there any way of extracting only the new 'reply' text ??
Is there any hidden stuff within the headers ??
...or something I can add to the headers??

[madwormer2]

I dont think there is a way to control what the client sends you, it'll do what it wants with the original email, and reply how it wants, so the best way to do it is via a different approach.

Think about performing a function that recognises the different information sent from different clients, and strips what is not needed accordingly. How you'd go about this, I have NO idea 😛

[leatherback]

Hm... You also lured me here, sorry for not matching the specifications, lol. Do you mind if I reply?

You do know to which post they are replying? You Could do a bruatl patternmatching: Take say the first 30 characters of the first line of the message they replied to, and match that. That should give you a point to start breacking up the text.

Then I think it is a matter of "training" your software, and add delineator strings to a matching array, for further breacking of the messages.

J.

[danielle]

I'll have the text of the original email sent so I can dig out that...

It's all the different "On June 1 [e-mail] wrote..." or "------Original Message------ From: [e-mail]..." and just the email content which could start with > or an indent and any custom stuff someone might do...

So even if I clear out the bulk of the original email's text, the "On June 1..." would be in there... probably get in trouble using "On" as a delimiter....

hrmph!