Hi all,
Issue: I've been tasked with extracting a bunch of MIME attachments (M$Word docs) from emails which have been stored in an imap folder in /home/<username>/mail/<imap foldername>. As the subject states, the imap folder is about 700MB.
Googling suggested that munpack might do the trick, but as it is intended only for one message at a time, it outputs the first attachment found, then exits gracefully.
Further searches seemed to talk about mimedump, so I yum installed perl-MIME-tools.noarch from rpmforge as mimedump this was needed, and includes mimedump.
I've read the man page, but am wholly unclear as to: 1) will this do the trick for me 2) are there other known tools which might be recommended
Thanks in advance, -Ray
System runs CentOS 5.1, not updated since April, but it is not connected to the internet (I do bring it online to install packages as needed); I will do a complete upgrade before the end of this month.
Ray Leventhal wrote:
Issue: I've been tasked with extracting a bunch of MIME attachments (M$Word docs) from emails which have been stored in an imap folder in /home/<username>/mail/<imap foldername>. As the subject states, the imap folder is about 700MB.
Googling suggested that munpack might do the trick, but as it is intended only for one message at a time, it outputs the first attachment found, then exits gracefully.
Further searches seemed to talk about mimedump, so I yum installed perl-MIME-tools.noarch from rpmforge as mimedump this was needed, and includes mimedump.
I've read the man page, but am wholly unclear as to:
- will this do the trick for me
- are there other known tools which might be recommended
Mime::Parser will split out the body and attachments of a message into files. I've only used it on single files being delivered via procmail like this:
use MIME::Parser; ### Create parser, and set some parsing options: $archive='/path/to/dir'; my $parser = new MIME::Parser; ### Change how nameless message-component files are named: $parser->output_dir("$archive"); $parser->output_prefix('msg'); ### Parse input: $entity = $parser->parse(*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
But you'll probably want to do something a little more clever to toss the body and use sensible filenames for the attachments. I think Mime::Parser::Filer can do that.
<snip>
I've read the man page, but am wholly unclear as to:
- will this do the trick for me
- are there other known tools which might be recommended
Mime::Parser will split out the body and attachments of a message into files. I've only used it on single files being delivered via procmail like this:
use MIME::Parser; ### Create parser, and set some parsing options: $archive='/path/to/dir'; my $parser = new MIME::Parser; ### Change how nameless message-component files are named: $parser->output_dir("$archive"); $parser->output_prefix('msg'); ### Parse input: $entity = $parser->parse(*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
But you'll probably want to do something a little more clever to toss the body and use sensible filenames for the attachments. I think Mime::Parser::Filer can do that.
Hi Les,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm wholly ignorant of how to go about doing this using your suggestion. Are there resources to which you might point me for additional info? Thanks again, -Ray
Ray Leventhal wrote:
I've read the man page, but am wholly unclear as to:
- will this do the trick for me
- are there other known tools which might be recommended
Mime::Parser will split out the body and attachments of a message into files. I've only used it on single files being delivered via procmail like this:
use MIME::Parser; ### Create parser, and set some parsing options: $archive='/path/to/dir'; my $parser = new MIME::Parser; ### Change how nameless message-component files are named: $parser->output_dir("$archive"); $parser->output_prefix('msg'); ### Parse input: $entity = $parser->parse(*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
But you'll probably want to do something a little more clever to toss the body and use sensible filenames for the attachments. I think Mime::Parser::Filer can do that.
Hi Les,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm wholly ignorant of how to go about doing this using your suggestion. Are there resources to which you might point me for additional info?
That was the whole perl program needed to split the body of a message and any MIME attachments into separate files, given one email message on standard input. If that doesn't make sense, you'll probably have to start with the 'learning perl' book or any general perl programming tutorials. There are some details about the Mime::Tools package and how to use the components here: http://search.cpan.org/~doneill/MIME-tools/
Les Mikesell wrote:
Ray Leventhal wrote:
I've read the man page, but am wholly unclear as to:
- will this do the trick for me
- are there other known tools which might be recommended
Mime::Parser will split out the body and attachments of a message into files. I've only used it on single files being delivered via procmail like this:
use MIME::Parser; ### Create parser, and set some parsing options: $archive='/path/to/dir'; my $parser = new MIME::Parser; ### Change how nameless message-component files are named: $parser->output_dir("$archive"); $parser->output_prefix('msg'); ### Parse input: $entity = $parser->parse(*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
But you'll probably want to do something a little more clever to toss the body and use sensible filenames for the attachments. I think Mime::Parser::Filer can do that.
Hi Les,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm wholly ignorant of how to go about doing this using your suggestion. Are there resources to which you might point me for additional info?
That was the whole perl program needed to split the body of a message and any MIME attachments into separate files, given one email message on standard input. If that doesn't make sense, you'll probably have to start with the 'learning perl' book or any general perl programming tutorials. There are some details about the Mime::Tools package and how to use the components here: http://search.cpan.org/~doneill/MIME-tools/
Thanks, Les. I'm digging into the docs now.
Much obliged, -Ray
<snip>
Hi Les,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm wholly ignorant of how to go about doing this using your suggestion. Are there resources to which you might point me for additional info?
That was the whole perl program needed to split the body of a message and any MIME attachments into separate files, given one email message on standard input. If that doesn't make sense, you'll probably have to start with the 'learning perl' book or any general perl programming tutorials. There are some details about the Mime::Tools package and how to use the components here: http://search.cpan.org/~doneill/MIME-tools/
Thanks, Les. I'm digging into the docs now.
Solution was easier than I'd expected. I implemented Les' perl mime extractor script with slight mods so that on a go-forward, this will happen without intervention.
For the 700MB imap folder of historical docs, I used a thunderbird add-on called 'extract attachments' which does just what it says. Got over 1300 docs in less than 10 mins simply by subscribing to the folder and running the add-on.
Thanks for the script and docs pointer, Les.
-Ray
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Les Mikesell -
Ray Leventhal