> > 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.
Funny that you should mention this. I'm working on it, sort of. Maybe what I'm working on could be changed a little bit to do what you want too. Some of you may recall that after improving attachment-sending in nmh, I've had some wild ideas about how to improve attachment handling on the reading end. What I had been thinking about was to have scan listings report the components of multipart messages on separate lines, so if message 100 had two parts there would be a scan listing for 100.1 and 100.2 that could be accessed separately via show. Fear of m_getfld has kept me from trying this. But, I had an aha a week ago on a simpler thing to do that's not quite as nice (to me) but gets me 90% of the way there in a much simpler way. I'm writing a new utility, "mburst", which does to mime messages what burst does to digests. So it can be used to break a mime message up into separate messages, each containing one part. Combined with the overly complex options to suppress mail header printing, this will allow the non-ascii parts to be cat'ed out and piped to other programs for processing. Note that I am thinking of addding a simple option to (mh)show to suppress mail header printing. Would this do it for you? Jon _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
