Office Automation

tonkatruck · General User Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 31

Hello again, long time no post.

Just a quick reminder. I am the guy who is using OO to run my Ebay business and needed some help writing some formulas to work out Ebay/Paypal fees for my working spread sheets.

Anyway all has been working as it should be but I am now getting a bit sick and tired of cut pasting data from Ebay/Paypal emails into my spread sheets.

Soooo, what I wish to do is try to automate the whole thing. Of course I have no idea where to start but have some theories as to what MAYBE required. What I have in mind is to....

1: one filter incoming emails to sort into Ebay or Paypal.
2: somehow take certain fields or lines of data (name, address, item num, blah, blah) from said emails and have them automatically entered into a data base.
3: Data base should be queryable for waiting payment, shipment, lost in post, whatever.
4: I wish to have some function I can call to find all items awaiting dispatch and then print off postage/packing labels.
5: I wish to have some functionality to take certain data from data base and send out customised emails confirming orders, payments, shipping, etc.

Like I say though don't really have much of an idea of where to start so if someone can kind of point me in the right direction as to what is required for each step I can research from there.

I am familiar with Linux and am running Slacky 11, use Kmail, Spamassassin & KDE.

Thanks in advance and all pointers very much appreciated.

tonkatruck

PS. Apologies if this is not in the right forum, didn't quite know where to put it.

jrkrideau · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 11:25 am Post subject:

I have no idea of how to do what you want but can you give us some information on exactly what you're doing and what what you want to get out of this.

1) Is all the information comming from emails?
2) Are the emails of a standard format that might allow one to grab the specific bits of information that you want?
3) What exactly do you have set up now?
4) Are you matching the Ebay and Paypal transactions (I assume you are) and if so how?
5) Do you have a way to capture the emails in a file now?
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Kingston ON Canada
Currently using Windows 7 & OOo 3.4.0 and Ubuntu 12.04 & LibreOffice 3.5.2.2

tonkatruck · General User Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Posts: 31

Hi jrkrideau. Thanks for having a look.

1) Is all the information coming from emails?
Yes all information would be arriving via emails (none html).

2) Are the emails of a standard format that might allow one to grab the specific bits of information that you want?
Yes. So I did have in mind something like grab line 3 words 2 + 3, etc.

3) What exactly do you have set up now?
Not much, just manually copy the bits of info I need from the emails and paste into a spread sheet. Quite laborious to say the least.

4) Are you matching the Ebay and Paypal transactions (I assume you are) and if so how?
Only manually. If I manage to automate this to a degree this is something I would have to work on. But I am thinking of just taking the details from the Ebay 'sold' emails and then when I receive a Paypal payment I only need to over write (or perhaps a different entry) the shipping address with the one that comes with the Paypal email, perhaps?
Also perhaps I need to search for the item num in data base and if not found create and entry, if found update (a little more complicated than that as if it is a shop sale item nums can be the same)

5) Do you have a way to capture the emails in a file now?
NO. The only thing I could set up is a filter in Kmail. This is something I need to find out how to do. Is this where I need perhaps a command line driven email client or Sendmail or am I just plain wrong here??

Thanks for any advice. I don't expect anyone to really tell me how to do it completely just perhaps say you need to look at this/do this for that stage, look at this for the next stage, etc.

TonkaTruck.

Villeroy · Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 2:37 am Post subject:

Do yourself a favour and get away from that spreadsheet idea. There are thousands of script modules on the net to process plain text emails (or even html) in any way you may have never thought of. Your business solution requires some decent programming, utilizing existing tools. Finally a spreadsheet program *could* be one tool among others to calculate your success of failure from the generated data.
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