How to split mailbox into single file per message?

linux bash email unix mbox
Stepan Yakovenko picture Stepan Yakovenko · Jul 1, 2012 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

I'd like to split my inbox into separate files (one file per one message) by bash command, or may be simple program in Java. How can I do it?

WBR, Thanx.

Answer

Igor Chubin picture Igor Chubin · Jul 1, 2012

Just use formail. formail is a program that can process mailbox, run some actions for each message in the mailbox, separate messages and so on.

More info: http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/formail/

If you want just split a mailbox to separate files, I would suggest such solution:

$ cat $MAIL | formail -ds sh -c 'cat > msg.$FILENO'

From man:

   FILENO
        While splitting, formail  assigns  the  message  number  currently
        being  output  to  this  variable.   By presetting FILENO, you can
        change the initial message number being used and the width of  the
        zero-padded  output.   If  FILENO is unset it will default to 000.
        If FILENO is non-empty and does not contain a number, FILENO  gen-
        eration is disabled.

Related questions

Sending HTML mail using a shell script

How can I send an HTML email using a shell script?

Read More
How to insert a delay between pipelining commands in a bash script. E.g. cat file | telnet mail.domain.com 25

I have a bash script that creates a file and I would like to send an email at the end via telnet. However sometimes it will execute and sometimes it won't. The command at the end is cat tempfile | telnet …

Read More
Looping through the content of a file in Bash

How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash? With this script: echo "Start!" for p in (peptides.txt) do echo "${p}" done I get this output on the screen: Start! ./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error …

Read More