Using Perl to scan a Lotus Notes database quickly

I had a couple of hundred messages lying around in the depths of my work e-mail account. They were old Majordomo subscribe/unsubscribe alerts for a mailing list I managed (until we switched over to Mailman). I had kept them around because one of these days I figured I’d load the information into a database to track the evolution of the subscriber base.

I haven’t managed to get around to doing that yet, but I did want to get rid of the messages. All I needed was the subject line of the mail (which contained all the necessary info) and the date the message was received. The idea of doing it manually would have been a nightmare. I searched around a bit for a way of automating the task, and discovered that it could be done through OLE.

So I wrote a quick Perl program to do it. It went like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;

my $Notes = Win32::OLE->new('Notes.NotesSession')
    or die "Cannot start Lotus Notes Session object.\n";
my $db = $Notes->GetDatabase("MyServer/MyDomain", "mail/mymail.nsf")
    or die "Could not open database.\n";
my $all = $db->AllDocuments;

foreach my $n (1 .. $all->Count) {
    my $doc  = $all->GetNthDocument($n);
    my $item = $doc->GetFirstItem('Subject');
    if (!$item) {
        warn "doc $n has no subject\n";
        next;
    }

    my $subject = $item->{Text};
    next unless $subject =~ /^(?:UN)?SUBSCRIBE my-mailing-list/;
    print $doc->GetFirstItem('DeliveredDate')->{Text}, " $subject\n";
}

and presto, the deed was done. This saved me I don’t know how many hours of mind-crushingly boring and RSI-inducing cutting and pasting. It’s so trivial it’s not even worth bundling up, so this is probably the best place for other people to stumble across it in a search (hi!).

I’m not sure if Strawberry Perl is bundled with Win32::OLE, but this works straight out of the box with ActivePerl.