Hi-

I know this is really a flash and third party tools for flash forum, but all you guys are high-level language developers, so you must be able to give me a pointer or two.

I have a client for whom we sent out 17000 emails. She received about 4000 back as bounces, to Outlook on a Mac.

Having previously had little experience with bulk mail ( formerly, I though 3000 mails was a lot! ) I suggested that she put all bounces into a folder, then bring the resultant txt file ( on a PC this would be foldername.dbx, on a Mac it turns out to be foldername.mbox )

Example formt:
PHP Code:
...
To: [email]bounce@XXXXXX.co.za[/email]
Subject: Message status - undeliverable
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="=_A586A6FB.21402DE2"
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.2 (2004-11-16) on ariel.telkomsa.net
X-Spam-Level: ****
X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_60,DATE_IN_PAST_12_24,
    HTML_90_100,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_08,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02,HTML_MESSAGE,
    NO_REAL_NAME autolearn=no version=3.0.2

This is a MIME message. If you are reading this text, you may want to 
consider changing to a mail reader or gateway that understands how to 
properly handle MIME multipart messages.

--=_A586A6FB.21402DE2
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Disposition: inline

The message that you sent was undeliverable to the following:
    [email]XXXXXX@XXXXXX.co.za[/email] (user not found)
... etc etc 
I had already written an ASP page that reads a DBX, using regular expressions to extract any email addresses, and then compare to and delete from our original database.

So, in this case, and as I am learning .NET, I decided to create a .NET app to do the same. ( learning = on my second day )

It works well enough when file sizes are small, reading the file one line at a time, testing for email addresses, and then writing them to a file, but the bounced email file she returned to me is 80Mb, and after I left my app running for an hour ( consuming 100% of my processor ) it had not finished.

So, finally, what I need from you is: am I completely mad? Is there a better way to extract email addresses from an unformatted txt file?