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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 ...
Answer
#1: Initial revision
by
Canina
·
2023-10-04T12:23:27Z (8 months ago)
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](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2047#section-2)) form. One way to decode this seems to be using PHP's [iconv_mime_decode](https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv-mime-decode.php) function; for example, by piping through something like `php -r 'echo iconv_mime_decode(stream_get_contents(STDIN),1,"utf-8");'`