Re: [gentoo-user] 2000 emails - printing, sorting by date

[Daniel Quinn]

I’m a Python guy, so my answer to this would be "use Python" :-)

[The ReportLab 
library](https://www.reportlab.com/docs/reportlab-userguide.pdf) is 
extremely powerful and can be used to generate a PDF for every email or 
a pdf for all emails.  I've not used it myself, but I hear it's very good.

That’s the hard part really. Outside of that, you’d just use something 
like this:

```python
import os
from email import policy
from email.parser import BytesParser

maildir = "/path/to/maildir"
messages = []

for mail in os.listdir(maildir):
     with open(os.path.join(maildir, mail)) as f:
         raw = f.read()
         message = BytesParser(policy=policy.default).parsebytes(f.read())
         if "someone@××××××××××.com" in raw:
             messages.append(message)
```

Once you've created a collection of email objects, you can use the 
powers of the email module to easily parse out the bits you want. You 
can take a look at some code I wrote that does just that 
[here](https://github.com/UKTradeInvestment/barbara/blob/master/interactions/mail.py#L27). 
Once you've parsed the message, you can then sort your list based on the 
date.  Something like this:

```python
messages.sort(key=lambda _: _["Date"])
```

At that point you have a sorted list of email objects which you can then 
use ReportLab to generate a PDF.

Good luck :-)