Hi all, I'm a complete newbie to this newsgroup and to Python (pretty much) so please be nice and give me a warm welcome.
First of all please allow me to properly introduce myself. My name is James Christian and I am a PhD student at the University of Essex in England doing research on Machine Translation. You can see my minimalist homepage at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~jcread Aside from machine translation I also have other AI related research interests that have led me to seek the wisom of Python users and developers on this newsgroup. In a nutshell my problem is this. I have developed an intelligent conversational agent which dialogues with a user to find out what they are really searching for. The domain is open and helps the user find which businesses/websites offer the services or products the user is looking for according to needs elicited from the user during the dialogue. I have small but growing base of experimental users who want to access the agent via email (the agent can be quite slow at times due to the complexity of the system) so that they can ask questions and forget about them until an answer comes to their inbox. And so I need to extend my agent so that it can receive and send emails and extract the relevant text answers to questions from the user. This requires full threading capabilities and automatic text extraction of only the new and relevant material (minus signatures of course). Now, I'm not completely lazy and so I have already done a little homework. I've been reading O'Reilly's Programming Python and Foundations of Python Network Programming which have both been very helpful in ascertaining that Python is a strong candidate solution. Both books talk about the email (for message and header construction and parsing) sendmail (for sending mail via SMTP) and poplib (for receiving mail with POP3) libraries. However, as you can imagine I already really quite have my work cut out with maintaining and expanding the dialogue of the system and with the research on Machine Translation. What I really need is a ready made fully functional Python client that already has it that offers me a simple interface to extract text from received messages along with a message id that I can use to associate the response to a question with and allows me to send out new questions or answers along with a message id I can use to track future responses with. I need something that already has the whole shebang. Can support POP3, IMAP, SSL authentication, message threading etc. Can anyone point to something that will save me the effort of building this thing from scratch and first principles? Thanks in advance for any useful suggestions. James Christian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
