Which email client to use?

[sweetcow]

There're are some "power" things I'd like to do with my emails, such as:
-Parsing them and exporting to a CSV file
-Sorting the emails into folders based on some rather complicated rules

Which is the best email "client" to use if i need to do things like this?
-It'd be nice to use gmail, because that's what I'm already using, but I'm thinking that's not really an option (no chance greasemonkey scripts could perform what I need?

-It'd be nice to use Thunderbird, because it's free and so fast and light. But I can't find any parsers or anything in the "add-on" directory

-I'm thinking I'll have to use Outlook. There's already a GREAT deal of user-written VBA code to work off of when it comes to parsers and other customization like I would like to do. And the link to Outlook to Excel would probably be very smooth.

Um, this isn't much a question so far, but basically I'm asking if I'm missing something? -- does my logic hold up? thank you.

 

[58sniper]

You didn't mention what kind of account you're using. POP3? IMAP4? Exchange?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[JockMullin]

I would tend to agree that Outlook is your best bet for this sort of thing. T-bird is excellent and especially nice in handling multiple accounts but doesn't have the scripting ability you will need. And as you say a lot of stuff is already available for Outlook.

Using outlook doesn't preclude using Gmail which is accessible as POP3/SMTP from within outlook, and in fact that interface is a lot more robust than Google's webmail and often keeps working even when the webmail has one of its periodic outages. It also gives you the advantage of accessing your message store from anywhere and using Google's search and antispam, both of which are excellent.

Jock

 

[sweetcow]

58sniper, sorry it's POP3 I'm using.

Yes, I'll probably use Gmail and then download the emails to Outlook for messing around with. thank you.