[Plugin: Postie] Feature request: Parse email to separate posts?

I was hoping that it may be possible in a future iteration of Postie to be able to parse an email into sections and each section be posted as a separate blog entry.

This is what I’m doing with Postie now: I’ve got a Mailman listserv that a large audience subscribes to. Unfortunately Mailman has a pretty lousy archive (it’s butt-ugly and not search-friendly) and so I looked to WordPress as a way of archiving these listserv messages in a more user-friendly format. Postie is the best tool for this by far. However there is one thing that it doesn’t do (and as far as I know, no plug-in yet created can) and that is parse emails.

Our email messages are basically a list of related items put together manually into one email. We do this to reduce the email load on our audience. We would use Mailman’s digest function for this, but like Mailman’s archive, its digests are equally butt-ugly. This manual digesting works fine for email, but when it comes out on the blog, you get some really long posts and the search results are less exact (since it truncates the top of the message when displaying search results, even if the keyword is at the bottom).

So what I’m asking for (and I apologize for my hubris in making the request) is that in a future iteration of Postie a function be added where postie can take a message and break it up. I was thinking that this could be done in either the same manner we now identify tags, start and end, or perhaps in the same way Postie can strip-off the email signature. In fact that latter method would be preferable to me as it would mean that I could separate posts in the body of the email with a very natural looking serious of dashes, rather than a bracketed “parse” command or what have you. In either method when Postie encountered the mark-up, it could then take what follows and create a post, until it runs into another marker which would mark the beginning of the next post to parse out. The fist line of any section would default as the header for the post.

Maybe I’m dreaming, but if it can be done I’m pretty sure that there are other situations out there where others are doing similar things and would find it just as useful.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/