Hacking Gmail

198 Part III — Conquering Gmail

Listing 14-1 (continued)

....print OUTPUT “Sent: “. $full_message->{$id}->{“sent”}

. “\n”;
....print OUTPUT “Subject: “. strip_bold($full_message-

{$id}->{“subject”}). “\n\n”;
....print OUTPUT $full_message->{$id}->{“body”}. “\n\n----
\n”;
}

close OUTPUT;

Running the script produces a file in the directory the script is run from called

mailarchive.txt. It will look rather like this:

Sender: [email protected]

Sent: 12:01pm

Subject: This is a mail

You are a very sexy man.

Love

Bob x

----

Sender: [email protected]

Sent: 11:23pm

Subject: Terrible confession

I’ve lost my wristwatch. Have you seen it?

Puzzled

Bob x

----

And so on. Very nice for printing or storing on a keychain flash drive in case of

some form of dreadful server failure at the Google farm. Of course, flippancy aside,

it is nice to have a printout of a series of mails. As you know from previous chap-

ters how to select mails from specific labels, you can use a variation of Listing 14-1

to provide backups of mail specific to certain projects, or subjects, or whatever you

like. That is very useful, depending on your own personal work style.