Using AppleScript to find specific text in mail message?

Question

I'm new to scripting, and I'm a bit lost on this one...
Is there any way to use AppleScript to find a file name from within the body of a mail message so it can be used later in the script?
Specifically, I want to use AppleScript to "read" the content of a mail message and look for a paragraph that says "Filename: MyFileName" so I can set "MyFileName" as a variable. (There will always be a paragraph that begins with "Filename: " in this particular email message.)
This will part of a larger script that uses Fetch to download "MyFileName" from our FTP server.
Thanks in advance for any ideas - I'm struggling with this one.
Andy Gill

Answer 1

Ok, red_menace above me had a shorter and more elegant solution to the question, I'm adding this just for another example.
To solve your problem I'd make a mail rule that looked for any messages with "Filename:" in them (along with whatever criteria you wanted, like sender, domain, etc). The mail rule would execute the Applescript. My assumption is that the "Filename:foobar" text could be anywhere in the email, not necessarily the first thing in a paragraph, so I had to parse it differently.
The results end up in a datalist, (theFilename {} ) that you can parse later to collect all filenames found in whatever messages were processed.
I realize this could be cleaner, hope it's not hard to follow, but I did it really fast. It works flawlessly for me, picking out the name of the file no matter where in the email it appears.
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages theSelectedMessages for rule theRule
repeat with aCounter from 1 to count theSelectedMessages
set theMessage to item aCounter of theSelectedMessages
set theContent to content of theMessage
set theWords to every word of theContent
set theFilename to {}
set tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ":"
repeat with thisLoop in theWords
try
if (text item 1 of thisLoop) is "Filename" then
set end of theFilename to (text item 2 of thisLoop)
-- rest of your logic goes here the display is just to show it finds the filename, take it out!
display dialog theFilename ¬
buttons {"OK"}
end if
end try
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
end repeat
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
Message was edited by: stephen.bradley Typos for the win!