The London Perl and Raku Workshop takes place on 26th Oct 2024. If your company depends on Perl, please consider sponsoring and/or attending.
 / 
Mail-Summary-Tools-0.01
River stage zero No dependents
/ Mail::Summary::Tools

NAME

Mail::Summary::Tools - Tools for mailing list summarization.

SYNOPSIS

        # create a summary from anything Mail::Box can open.
        # you may also programatically create summary objects and serialize
        # them if you don't have the threads in a standard mail format.

        % mailsum create --dates --posters --clean -i foo.mbox -o summary.yaml


        # edit the text in your editor, if you don't like YAML files

        % mailsum edit --skip --dates --posters --links --archive gmane summary.yaml


        # create pretty outputs

        % mailsum totext --shorten -a google summary.yaml > summary.txt
        % mailsum tohtml --archive google summary.yaml > summary.html

DESCRIPTION

This distribution contains numerous classes useful for creating summaries, and an App::CLI based frontend to those classes.

The main usage is illustrated in the "SYNOPSIS" section.

WORKFLOW

In the first step Mail::Summary::Tools takes a mail box of any sort as input, and creates a YAML file for the summary. This file contains a hierarchal structure whereby every thread belongs to exactly one list (cross posts should not be summarized twice), and lots of meta data is also maintained.

This file may be hand edited if you're comfortable with YAML, but typically you use the flat file format, exposed using the edit command to alter the summary texts, hide threads, assign threads to a different list, etc. This can be done either interactively (with Proc::InvokeEditor) or using --save and --load.

If any updating of the summary is necessary you should load all the changes you have using the edit command, and run create --update (it needs a better name). Out of date threads will be marked as long as you use the --dates option (if a thread is summarized and it's end date is extended by the update then it is marked out of date).

When you are done you can emit using totext and tohtml. The default outputs assume that the summary text is written in the markdown language. This translates well to HTML, and looks pretty good as-is in plain text.

COMPONENTS

These are the main components of this distribution:

Mail::Summary::Tools::Summary

The model for summary objects

Mail::Summary::Tools::FlatFile

Export and load Mail::Summary::Tools::Summary fields from a convenient flatfile format.

Mail::Summary::Tools::Output

The various output formats, like plain text, HTML.

Mail::Summary::Tools::CLI

The App::CLI based components

Classes for creating links to mailing list archives (google groups, gmane, etc).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Here are a few possible extensions to this project which we may or may not get around to:

  • Long term persistence of thread status - what has been summarised, what needs revisiting, etc, based on a config + state file per mailing list.

  • Archive downloading tools, for backlogging, possibly based on Net::NNTP or WWW::Google::Groups.

    This is important for offline viewing.

  • A local running webapp to streamline summarization.

  • Posting interface - Atom (for blogs), use.perl.org, and to various mailing lists.

SEE ALSO

Mail::Box, App::CLI, Template, Proc::InvokeEditor, YAML, YAML::Syck.

AUTHORS

Yuval Kogman, <nothingmuch@woobling.org>

Ann Barcomb

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright 2006 by Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch@woobling.org>, Ann Barcomb

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.