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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Valdis,

> > 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.
> 
> This *does* break horribly for digital signatures - I suspect that
> both an S/MIME and a PGP signature would be invalidated by changing
> the embedded file into a reference.

I expect they would.

> Also, things get interesting if you try to forward the mail along with
> the attachment - I do *not* think it would DTRT with the reference (in
> other words, the recipient would just get a dangling reference, not
> the file.

Probably, since the I'm happy for the reference to be to a local file as
opposed to, e.g. an FTP URL.

> The forwarding problem is probably solvable, I suspect that the
> digital signature one is *not*, unless you find a way to reconstitute
> the original on a byte-per-byte basis (and making sure that for the
> corner case of a PGP or S/MIME signature that actually covers a
> *reference*, that we do *not* expand the reference as that will also
> break the signature....)

For my purposes, essentially long-term archiving, I'm happy with editing
an email message, breaking the digital signatures, and I'm unlikely to
want to forward the email to anyone.  But I see your point.

I suppose a bit of an MIME-aware scripting language would do it.  Python
has its email package, used by Mailman amongst other things, but I'd
heard it isn't strictly conforming.

    http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-October/003336.html

Cheers,


Ralph.