[Nmh-workers] Wishlist: Extracting Attachments from Email.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Here's a wishlist item.  Not because I think there's someone with the
time to work on it, but because I thought it worth making public;
perhaps someone knows how to already do this.

I keep lots of old emails.  Some of those come with attachments, some
large ones.  MIME-encoding isn't a space-efficient way to store a file,
and it's worse if the author forgot to compress the file.

With an incremental backup system I suffer repeated backups of these
overweight emails when a folder is packed, or they're sorted, etc.  I'd
like a way to extract specific parts of a MIME email to, e.g.,
~/mail/attach/$msgid/foo.tar.bz2 and alter the email to have a reference
to the extracted file instead.  The email's smaller and I don't mind so
much its repeated appearance in the backups.

Optionally, the extracted file may be better compressed along the way,
e.g. an embedded tar file becomes a reference tar.bz2 file if it's
smaller.

mhstore and a little scripting gets me the first half, it's the editing
the email to change the embedded file into a reference that's the issue.

Cheers,


Ralph.