Software Development

I am writing some scripts that operate on emails in Maildir format. A lot of things are easy in this format, but the filenames are absolutely incomprehensible.

For example, one script moves mails between folders based on some rules. It has a dry run mode which simply says which mails would be moved. But the output is useless, because I can't tell anything from the gobbledygook filenames. I have to painstakingly paste the filename into cat, so I can figure out what the mail is about and confirm whether it should have been filtered or not. This problem occurs for many other situations.

How can I provide sensible names, such as {sender}: {truncated subject}? I obviously can't rename the actual files, since that would break Maildir. This also needs to be stable vs. sync tools like offlineimap - I dunno if that's relevant, since I only have a basic understanding of IMAP & Maildir.

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How to provide meaningful names for emails in Maildir?

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