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How to provide meaningful names for emails in Maildir?
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.
1 answer
This is pretty much exactly what formail is good at.
Specifically useful for this case, formail lets you extract headers, given an email message on RFC 822-esque format.
In bash, if you have the name of a Maildir message file in $FILE, you can do something like this:
$ FROM="$(formail -x From: -c <$FILE)"
$ SUBJECT="$(formail -x Subject: -c <$FILE)"
$ printf '%s: %-40s\n' "$FROM" "$SUBJECT"
Note that formail will return the headers in raw form, which are quite likely to be in MIME encoded-word (RFC 2047 section 2) form. One way to decode this seems to be using PHP's iconv_mime_decode function; for example, by piping through something like php -r 'echo iconv_mime_decode(stream_get_contents(STDIN),1,"utf-8");'
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