Email is an important form of data
- Eliot Muir
If It is one of the oldest data formats of the internet and yet still extremely important today.
We’re in the process of using IguanaX to redo our own email infra-structure. Over a decade ago under my direction we put together an email archive.
Our email archive is pretty wonky. It works but it’s held together with rubber bands and sticky tape - we have a perl script which uses the IMAP protocol to get the feed. The stream of emails is then processed so we index it with a mysql database and we keep the raw email messages on disc.
The archive is wonky in many ways but it does get a lot of things right:
From our CRM have hyperlinks for every contact so that can see the email history of every customer. With changing of staff over the years that’s been invaluable since more than once sales staff have had to go back and and find an old contract.
It allows everyone to see whats going on with a customer - who’s chatting etc.
We dispense with emails from sources that:
Are not in our CRM
Haven’t been emailed back
Are internal to the company - between staff
The things the archive get’s wrong are:
We needed to put more effort into parsing email - email is a pretty damned messy format - years of additions to the email standard and petabytes of spam make email a tricky format to parse.
Parsing email in IguanaX is a dream compared to the original C++ code we used for our old mail archive since get all the benefits of
I think this time around we can make a much better viewer of the emails.
Our email archive viewer had some design limitations with how we indexed emails and in the back end it was single threaded. So search my email and the whole thing would freeze for minutes lol
The whole system is opaque. Our system administrator is scared of the thing. That isn’t good.
It’s always been a dream of mine to use Iguana to process our email feed and thanks to all the improvements that’s very easy to do now.
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