[ruby-talk:19496] Re: Help! I'm still confused about threadin g in the ML

I have found one work-around (hack around) for this problem. Outlook
has for many years been anoying my with it's lack of threading and I
have longed to go back to VM in emacs. I have found one partial
solution (if you can call it that, which will allow you to transfer
your mail from Outlook into a standard UNIX mail format. You can then
take this file and use it in your favorite UNIX-like mail reader. (In
my case emacs.) This also assumes that there is an SMTP server
somewhere that you can connect with to send mail.

The solution is of course written in Ruby and is rather simple. So for
all who are interested:

<SNIP>
require 'win32ole'

session = WIN32OLE.new('Mapi.Session')
session.logon('Your Profile)

ruby = session.inbox.folders.getFirst
messages = ruby.messages

f = File.new('E:/mail/incomming, 'wb') or print "Can not open file"

messages.each do |m|
	text = m.fields.item(27).value + m.text
	text.delete!("\015")
	sender = m.sender.address
	ts = m.timeSent.split(/[ \/,:]/).collect! { |i| i.to_i }
	date = Time.gm(*ts)
	f.puts "From #{sender} #{date}"
	puts "From #{sender} #{date}"
	f.write text
	f.puts
end

f.close
</SNIP>

Thats it. And in your .vm file:

(setq vm-spool-files '("E:/mail/incomming"))

I am sure this can be automated a little more. Emacs can be instructed
to run the ruby script and then movemail, but I haven't got that far
in the VM manual. I also need to delete the mail from the folder after
it is read... If anyone wants to take this further, please do so...

- Will