Processing Remove Requests

I stumble upon an easier way to filter requests for removal from our email list and add them to our remove table in the database.

It turns out that in Apple Mail, if you select a bunch of emails and then click on the Forward button, it selects the content of each email and pastes it into a new email. For our remove folder, the process took a while, but the end result is something like this:
Remove_Email

There is a whole bunch of stuff I don’t need, but Mail nicely highlights the From name and address.

I selected the text and pasted it into BBEdit. Then I used the process lines feature to extract all lines starting with From: (case sensitive). There were a couple with Well Golly in them, but otherwise it was a pretty clean result, with one address per line, name first and email addresses in <> e.g.


From: DarrleneBarrett@aol.com
From: John Sollino <johnc1459@hotmail.com>
From: "Jane Alexander" <jalexander156@hotmail.com>
From: "Strand, Bill, Ph.D." <Strand.Bill@commoncore.edu>

From here it is easy to massage this into a form that can be imported into the database.

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