Re: Munging mailboxes

[Sam Roberts]

Bonjour,

Quoting Michael Schuerig <address@hidden>, who wrote:
> I'm interested in mailutils mostly for its mailbox/folder handling 
> capabilities. Tasks I'd like to use it for are similar to this: Extract 
> attachments from each message in a folder; save it to a file in some 
> given directory; replace the attachment part of the original message 
> with a link to the saved file.

mailutils hasn't been used for this kind of thing a lot, AFAIK, so the
APIs aren't always there, or publically exposed, or documented.

In this case there is a message_attachment_filename() that gets the
filename of the attachment, but it's not publically exposed. It, or
something like it, should be. message_save_attachment() has stub code
to use this name if you pass NULL for a filename, but there is what
looks like a bug preventing it being used this way. You could remove
the check for the filename arg being NULL and see how it works for you.

> What I don't yet understand is how to deal with attachments. I see that 
> I can accessed the individual parts of a multipart message. But how do 
> I get at the original filename and other attributes of an attached-file 
> part?

I don't know of a way to do this, but its the kind of thing I'd like
to add when I have time. But I have very little time. Do you? :-)

> Also, how can I decode the part's contents and avoid reading it 
> into memory entirely?

Not exactly sure what you mean here.

I don't think you can do anything but save a part decoded into a file,
so how would you get it into memory at all? And message_t uses temp
files a bunch, it seems, so it won't stick a whole message in memory.

> Obviously, programming tasks of this kind in C is somewhat tedious. 

Hopefully not as tedious as the API matures!

> That's why I'm pondering wrapping the needed parts of mailutils in 
> Ruby. Unless, by chance, someone has already done this.

No, but that would be really cool! I noticed Ruby's mailbox handling
wasn't very complete, and it didn't have imap support. I've been looking
for any excuse to do some work in Ruby. A side effect of doing  this
is it might make hacking a test suite together a lot easier.

Bon chance,
Sam

-- 
Sam Roberts <address@hidden> (Vivez sans temps mort!)