Listing Unique Projects Used by MailTags
Published on 23 Aug 2007 · Filed in Tutorial · 250 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)Spurred to see if I could become more efficient than I am currently, I’ve been experimenting with some GTD-style applications. As a result of my experiments, I found that I needed a list of all the MailTags projects I’ve ever used in any of my mailboxes. (To make a long story short, I want to use the same project names across all applications—Mail, GTD application, Spotlight comments for files, etc.) While you can see a list of projects in the Preferences, that list does not include all projects that might ever have been used.
It only took a few minutes of experimentation in the Terminal to come across the mdls command, which lists metadata for a file (or group of files). Perfect! Using mdls, I listed the metadata for an e-mail message, and found that it was the kMDItemProjects attribute that was used by MailTags. With that information in hand, I hacked together this quick process for listing all the projects in use across all my mailboxes:
mdls <mailbox path>/*.emlx | grep kMDItemProjects >> ~/all-projects.txt
Repeat this command for each mailbox (for example, I have a separate archive mailbox for each year). Once you’ve enumerated the information for all the mailboxes, then parse it down like this:
sort all-projects.txt > sorted-projects.txt
uniq sorted-projects.txt > unique-projects.txt
Now the file “unique-projects.txt” contains all the unique project names that are in use across all your mailboxes. Very handy! Now, if only obtaining a unique list of all the MailTags keywords were as easy…