How to save contents of many emails to individual files?

[iHateMacs]

Can someone point me in the right direction here.

Is what I am asking below possible to do in Automator or Applescript? (whichever is simplest)

I have hundreds of emails (EDIT 5000 !). Each one contains an XML representation of an order placed through our website.

Later on I want to parse the XML and get customer data from it, but first I need to save all these emails as individual files.

So all I need to automate is the saving of the contents of each email into a file. The file can be named anything, it doesn't matter. A sequential number would be ideal, but doesn't matter.

Can this saving of emails be done with automator/applescript or is there a better way? Anything is better than cutting and pasting each one.

[robbieduncan]

If you are using Apple Mail then, most likely, the messages are already some where in ~Library/Mail in .emlx format. For example, for me, in ~Library/Mail/Mac-robbieduncan/Forums/MacRumors.imapbox I currently have 19844 .emlx files, one for each mail in that mailbox.

The .emlx format is plain text and looks OK to extract the contents from...

[iHateMacs]

Thanks for that. I didn't know.

I don't understand the hierarchy, but as all my data is XML I should be able to look through all the files and grab what I need.

At least they are all in one account so that will reduce the number of files.

Thanks again.

[iHateMacs]

After all that I have found an even simpler way DOH!

Select the emails in large groups (1000 at a time seems to work ok) then choose FORWARD. When the new email opens up copy and paste into a text file.

I only had to do that 5 times.

[robbieduncan]

After all that I have found an even simpler way DOH!

Select the emails in large groups (1000 at a time seems to work ok) then choose FORWARD. When the new email opens up copy and paste into a text file.

I only had to do that 5 times.

Even better :)