[thelist] converting emails to database

[Joshua Olson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Glen Burnett" <glen at inception.co.nz>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 9:35 PM


> Perhaps this is what is being done now but there are 700 historic
> reservations that have to be imported into the new DB?

That's really not that many.  If cost is an issue you could bring in temp
help for half a day and whip through them all manually directly from Outlook
using cut'n'paste into a spreadsheet.  Once the spreadsheet is created then
conversion to a database is simple since you can access Excel via ODBC.

> If so, then the only way may be to find a Developer to write a script for
> you that will parse the email bodies, whether by accessing them from
Outlook
> or post processing them after they have been exported into the DB?

Post processing once they're out of Outlook via the export routine is the
way to go in this case.  Trying to work within Outlook will probably be very
time intensive, to say the least.

> If each email is laid out in exactly the same way the Developer could
write
> a script which looks for tabs, carriage returns, keywords etc.  Or, if the
> emails are in HTML, then by searching for specific HTML tags?

Correct in both cases.

It shouldn't be that tough.  If you need a developer (wink wink) I'd be
happy to do this for you.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com/service_areas/
706.210.0168