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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 ...
#2: Post edited
by
Alexei
·
2023-10-12T18:01:54Z (about 1 year ago)
removed irrelevant tag
#1: Initial revision
by
matthewsnyder
·
2023-10-04T05:26:52Z (about 1 year ago)
How to provide meaningful names for emails in Maildir?
I am writing some scripts that operate on emails in [Maildir format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir). 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](https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3) - I dunno if that's relevant, since I only have a basic understanding of IMAP & Maildir.