How to auto-delete from an email and then auto-forward?

blargface · 10 May 2019, 08:40 PM

I am looking for a way to automatically delete X amount of lines or characters in an email and then forward it to another address.

I am able to make ideas work that use a desktop program like outlook/thunderbird, or a web based application like gmail/outlook.

JeremyNicoll · 11 May 2019, 08:34 PM

Some desktop email clients have options when filtering incoming mails to direct them to an external file in a folder.

Some desktop mail clients have options to read mail from a folder (rather than, say, fetching them from a mail server).

If you have such a client, and can program, you can arrange for the required mails when fetched to be written somewhere specific, can have some mechanism of your own that monitors that location for anything that arrives there, that edits the files as you required and writes the changed ones to another folder... and finally have an 'account' in the email client that every so often reads and pending files from an external folder. You then use other filters in the mail client to forward the edited mails.

It's a long time since I looked at capabilities of desktop email programs, so hard to recommend one. Possibly you'd be best looking at programs in the Unix/Linux world where it's more common (than in Windows) to have mail clients which are separate from the transport mechanisms, as that'd make intercepting and processing mail simpler.

10 May 2019, 08:40 PM	#1
blargface Junior Member Join Date: May 2019 Posts: 1	How to auto-delete from an email and then auto-forward? I am looking for a way to automatically delete X amount of lines or characters in an email and then forward it to another address. I am able to make ideas work that use a desktop program like outlook/thunderbird, or a web based application like gmail/outlook.

11 May 2019, 08:34 PM	#2
JeremyNicoll Essential Contributor Join Date: Dec 2017 Location: Scotland Posts: 484	Some desktop email clients have options when filtering incoming mails to direct them to an external file in a folder. Some desktop mail clients have options to read mail from a folder (rather than, say, fetching them from a mail server). If you have such a client, and can program, you can arrange for the required mails when fetched to be written somewhere specific, can have some mechanism of your own that monitors that location for anything that arrives there, that edits the files as you required and writes the changed ones to another folder... and finally have an 'account' in the email client that every so often reads and pending files from an external folder. You then use other filters in the mail client to forward the edited mails. It's a long time since I looked at capabilities of desktop email programs, so hard to recommend one. Possibly you'd be best looking at programs in the Unix/Linux world where it's more common (than in Windows) to have mail clients which are separate from the transport mechanisms, as that'd make intercepting and processing mail simpler.