textmail filters a mail message or mbox file, 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 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-borne viruses). Its intended use is to reduce the size of a personal email archive but it could also be useful as a pre-processor for mailing lists. This is more friendly than a strict "No Attachments" or "No HTML" mailing list policy.
textmail is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
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-borne 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 manual entry:
textmail(1) |
- | the textmail(1) manual entry |
textmail-1.1.1.tar.gz [43211 bytes, 20230508]
|
(SHA256 dc6c373ed7060de16cdcfb7d5356ca3ca028a8346e70338be63931921184257f )
|
textmail-1.1.tar.gz [42825 bytes, 20230313]
|
(SHA256 20324025a89fc794822f8186f9d9049720b18d05e51d9b9db5f484f20f347543 )
|
textmail-1.0.tar.gz [45123 bytes, 20200625]
|
(SHA256 0a6c0a540230b660b3e0171382733e083b0b2d279e81edb9a380c378d52f0637 )
|
textmail-20070803.tar.gz [14706 bytes, 20070803]
|
(SHA256 d6e0252a4fdd0efe3822e9808976e976172a26937da9bc7a3324ac6d96845fbb )
|
textmail [49964 bytes, 20070803]
|
(SHA256 3bf852fe692f51bee8a37872f5d8a4811e69726ae33df87ef9592913ca2c6519 )
|