[a3n]

Automate something (my favorite advice), or analyze something. Find a task that has a lot of manual steps (copy a file here, copy a string from there, etc) and automate whatever you can.

Pick something apart and analyze it programatically. Email is great as there are protocols and libraries to do this with. Find a/the IMAP library for your language of choice, copy a bunch of messages to some place where you won't harm the originals, and start picking apart the folders and messages. See what you can know about what's in a folder and list it. See what you can know about a message, and list that all out.

You could do the same with a bare html document, there are really good libraries to pick apart an html doc. Beyond that, learn the DOM and pick it apart from that angle.