Project Detail

Description

The objective of this project is to write a simple Perl script which crawls a mbox email file (Thunderbird, plain text format) and extracts information into a ";"-delimeted table.

The mbox email file contains customer requests we received from our website in the past. The webform hasn't changed much, so mostly the emails are all in the same format:

Name: John Smith
Telephone: 01234 56789
Email:
Text: hello!
we are interested in ...
please contact us
John Smith
Captcha: A5T76
submit: send

In total there are about 700 of such emails in the email file, plus a few unrelated emails. The Perl script should extract the information in the field and write it to a table. The resulting table must be clean, only containing the field information, ready to open in Excel and use in a Mail Merge:

Name;Telephone;Email;Text
John Smith;01234-56789;;hello! we are interested in ... please contact us John Smith

The field "Text" contains line feed characters that the customers entered. So in the case of field "Text" maybe the following field name "Captcha" could be used as a delimiter to identify the end of the field.

Only bid if you can complete this task by Saturday, Nov. 15th, earlier completion is prefered. Important: You should slightly explain how you will solve this task, so that I can take your bid seriously. In case you are willing to do this for less than 30$ please state so in a PM.

I look forward to your bid.


Additional information submitted:

11/11/2008 at 21:26 EST:
You will receive a small part of the mbox file for testing on your side.

11/11/2008 at 22:42 EST:
Additionally, extracting date and time of the email into a date time field is necessary.