Extract/save a mail attachment using bash

bash linux attachments email

90,110

Solution 1

If you're aiming for portability, beware that there are several different versions of mail(1) and mailx(1). There's a POSIX mailx command, but with very few requirements. And none of the implementations I have seem to parse attachments anyway.

You might have the mpack package. Its munpack command saves all parts of a MIME message into separate files, then all you have to do is save the interesting parts and clean up the rest.

There's also metamail. An equivalent of munpack is metamail -wy.

Solution 2

The best program for this purpose is ripMIME.

It extracts the text and all attachments:

https://pldaniels.com/ripmime/

GitHub: inflex/ripMIME

Solution 3

YES possible
This is HOW (Resource from here)

find dir containing files | while read file; do

create tempdir and copy file there

run munpack on file and copy attachments elsewhere

destroy tempdir (contents)

done

Here is the Perl Script to do it

90,110

David Yates

I'm a hobbyist programmer, part-time sysadmin, and full-time analytics, big data, data center management, automation, and cloud computing architect and delivery engineer.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

David Yates almost 2 years
Using normal bash tools (ie, built-ins or commonly-available command-line tools), is it
- possible, and
- how
to extract/save attachments on emails?

For example, say I have a nightly report which arrives via email but is a zip archive of several log files. I want to save all those zips into a backup directory. How would I accomplish that?
subanki almost 14 years

If anyone wants me to paste the Perl script here then just leave a comment
David Yates almost 14 years

if you would be so kind (obviously leaving attribution of where you found it :) )
David Yates almost 14 years

just read the script ... that's a heckuva lot of perl!
subanki almost 14 years

so you are sure you want me to include that on my answer , it will become very long.
David Yates over 13 years

don't paste here, copying from the original source would be better in this case :)
David Yates about 10 years

btw - shared the bash script I ended up using here: antipaucity.com/2014/04/24/…
Pierz over 6 years

Also to add that if you want to also extract the text MIME parts of the email when using munpack then use the '-t' option: munpack -t email_file
george over 6 years

Thanks for the info about metamail. Can you please help me up with this question?
user3619803 about 6 years

sudo apt install ripmime works though. See also linux.die.net/man/1/ripmime . I use this program; works great, no dependencies except libc6.
Diego almost 6 years

good stuff, metamail and munpack not available on Ubuntu but ripmime is and does exactly what expected.
FelixJN over 4 years

Notably munpack works on single mails only. When dealing with a whole mailbox file, it needs to be split first. E.g. using formail < /val/mail/usersmailbox -s munpack . reference
Greg Sadetsky about 3 years

Thank you! brew install ripmime on macOS works well, and then ripmime -i <input file. Cheers
lepe about 2 years

comparing with munpack, it was able to handle better (not perfectly though) encoded file names