Re: Command-line/batch tools for handling mail attachments?

[Jim Holland <debian@mango.zw>]

Hi

On 11 Jan 2006, Don McLaughlin wrote:

> I'd appreciate any pointers to some command-line tools for doing the
> following.
> 
> (1) Take mail and news messages as input files and produce as output
>     files the same messages but with all the attachments, HTML parts,
>     and other non-plain-text stuff deleted, keeping the headers and
>     the plain-text of the body, as if the sender had written the
>     message without attachments or HTML.
> 
>     What I really want to do is use maildirs and news spools as input
>     and produce a directory of cleaned files, which will then be used
>     for corpus linguistics. But if I can find a straight filter
>     program (stdin, stdout) and I can write a script to find -exec it.
> 
>     I looked at mimefilter but I don't want to generate outgoing
>     messages to the senders and all that.
> 
> (2) Take a mail message file as input and output a directory
>     containing separate files of the decoded attachments and the text
>     of the message (preferably with the mail headers).
> 
>     This would be for archiving my own e-mail.

I am currently working on exactly this problem (for a FidoNet/Internet
mail gateway), but have no simple solutions.  The best utility that I have
come across so far is uudeview, which works well for extracting
attachments, but sadly it is not very good at keeping the headers and text
from the body of messages.

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service