Cleaning up threads by deleting duplicate or repeated content

I'm a new user of Entourage and was wondering if anyone could point me
in the direction of a script that will do this:

1) examine all the messages in a thread (or indeed mailbox)
2) identify where earlier messages are rendered superfluous because
they are quoted in full in later emails
3) delete all earlier messages that are fully quoted in later messages

This would reduce the number of messages in a thread or mailbox without
losing any content. I have found several scripts that will delete exact
duplicates, but what I am looking for is a bit more complicated, as the
contents of dissimilar messages must be compared to test for a subset
of common content.

Thanks for your help

Barry
Thu Mar 17 06:16:03 CST 2005

On 17/3/05 12:03 pm, in article
1111061037.852721.185210@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com,
"davidkchambers@gmail.com" <davidkchambers@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm a new user of Entourage and was wondering if anyone could point me
> in the direction of a script that will do this:
>
> 1) examine all the messages in a thread (or indeed mailbox)
> 2) identify where earlier messages are rendered superfluous because
> they are quoted in full in later emails
> 3) delete all earlier messages that are fully quoted in later messages
>
> This would reduce the number of messages in a thread or mailbox without
> losing any content. I have found several scripts that will delete exact
> duplicates, but what I am looking for is a bit more complicated, as the
> contents of dissimilar messages must be compared to test for a subset
> of common content.
>
> Thanks for your help
>

Such a script would be very difficult to write due to the potential
existence of quote characters, unpredictable line breaks in paragraphs when
quoting, the inclusion/exclusion of signature text etc.

Not only would the script be difficult, it would be excrutiatingly slow.


--
Barry Wainwright
Microsoft MVP (see http://mvp.support.microsoft.com for details)
Seen the All-New Entourage Help Pages? - Check them out:
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>