Textmail filters a mail message or mbox, replacing MS Word, MS Excel, HTML, RTF and PDF attachments with the plain text contained therein. By default, the following attachments are also deleted: image, audio, video and MS Windows executables. MS winmail.dat attachments are replaced by any attachments contained therein which are then replaced by text or deleted in the same fashion. Any of these actions can be suppressed with the command line options. Mail headers can also be selectively deleted.
This is useful for increasing the accessibility of mail messages (by reducing their dependence on proprietary file formats), for dramatically reducing their size (and the time it takes to download them and the time it takes to read them), and for dramatically reducing the risk of mail-bourne viruses). Its intended use is as a preprocessor for mailing lists. This is more friendly than a strict "No Attachments" policy.
Textmail is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
Translation to plain text
The following documents are translated into plain text: MS Word, MS Excel, RTF, HTML and PDF.
Deletion of large attachments
Image, audio and video attachments are deleted by default.
Elimination of mail-bourne viruses
MS Windows executable attachments are deleted by default.
Translation of winmail.dat attachments
MS TNEF (i.e. winmail.dat) attachments are unpacked
by default and replaced by any attachments contained therein which
are then replaced by text or deleted as required.
Deletion of binary attachments
Additionally, all application/octet-stream or all
application/* attachments can be deleted.
Deletion of unwanted mail headers
Headers can be deleted selectively by providing prefixes
(e.g. X-).
Robust
If it is impossible to translate an attachment, you have the choice of leaving the original attachment intact, or of discarding it in favour of the empty text translation.
For more information read the manual entry in the Documentation section.
Textmail is written in perl and executes several external programs. It should run on any system with the following software:
Textmail does not require any non-standard perl modules.
There is a manpage.
textmail(1) |
- | the textmail(1) manpage |
CHANGELOG |
- | the change log |
Note: There is no tarball. The download is the script itself. Just download
it into a directory in your $PATH and make it executable
(chmod +x textmail). Run textmail -m to read the
manpage.