[nmh-workers] mhshow and Headers

[Martin McCormick]

        nmh is one of the best software packages I have used in
my almost 30 years on unix-like systems so nobody should take
offense at the following questions:

        Is there any way in mhshow to "show" a message just for
the headers?

        Yes, this is a strange question but there is a method
behind the madness.

        I collect headers that I don't want to read and place
them in the ignores= lines of mhl.headers and mhl.edit.  I have
even written a perl script that does a "show" of a message and
then strips any headers that pop out between the blank line under
Subject: and the blank line before the body starts.  It looks for
the first field of a line ending in a : and begins building
ignores= lines for as many lines as it takes, adding new
comma-separated expressions as there are headers.  I then add
them to mhl.edit and mhl.headers and the collection is over 200
expressions long.

        If there was a way to just show the headers that have yet
to be blocked, I could show a range of messages, possibly all the
messages in a folder, strip out the headers and add them in a
more mechanized manner.

        After reading the man page for mhshow, I tried several
configurations for calling mhshow eg:

mhshow -form ~/Mail/mhl.headers.headers -part 1

mhl.headers.headers is a mutilated version of mhl.headers in
which everything is missing or commented out except ignores=
statements
; mhl.headers
;
; Default format file for displaying headers in
; MIME messages.  mhn calls the mhlproc with this
; filter to display message header.
;
overflowtext="***",overflowoffset=5
leftadjust,compwidth=9
;71 lines of ignores= statements separated by commas
extras:nocomponent
:

        One still sees the message body because it builds on the
fly which is generally no problem.

If one removes

extras:nocomponent

The body shows but all the useful headers like Subject and From go
away which is overkill so if there is a way to temporarily shut
off the generation of the body, we should have only headers that
need to be blocked.

        If messages happen not to go through mhshow and are plain
text, one does skip the body but the vast majority these days are
mime messages.

        If the documentation for mhshow does explain how to
suppress output of the temporary mime decodings, then I have
missed it and apologize.

        Sometimes, there are other ways to solve the same problem
so any suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.

Martin McCormick