POP3 Attachment Manager?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

So I have 100 students this semester, and sadly, that means they are going to be writing papers. I am looking for a file attachment utility for a POP3 email address that will help me save some time.

In a perfect world my students will email me papers with a filename I specify. The attachment utility would scrape my email, extract all of the attachments and save them locally, and retain the email address associated with each attachment. I would read them, grade them, and leave feedback in the files themselves. Then I would use the utility to email back each student’s paper with my comments.

I want to avoid going through my inbox and digging out 100 files to Save As separately, and, even worse, composing and manually attaching files to 100 separate emails. I’d like to avoid the risk of sending the wrong paper to the wrong student by human error.

The closest I have found is http://bitdaddys.com/poptransact.html, but it is not at all clear that I can use this program to send batch emails.

Any suggestions?

#2

Thunderbird with the AttachmentExtractor extension can do the first part of the job. You can select a group of emails, and in one step have it go through them all and extract all their attachments to a directory, having it assign file names that include the sender’s email (plus various other things). Unlike the program you found, it’s free.

Neither alternative appears to handle the other side of things, sending back feedback, but I imagine one could write a script to do it without too much trouble. It would go through each file in a directory, extract an email address from the file name, email the file to the recipient, then move the file into a “done” directory.