NEATMAIL

Neatmail is a noninteractive mail client. It generates listings of, and executes ex-like commands on messages in mailboxes in mbox format.

Neatmail provides the following commands (when invoked without an argument, most of them show a summary of supported options).

• mk: generate a listing of messages in an mbox.
• ex: execute the specified commands on an mbox.
• pg: page a message in an mbox.
• pn: prune an mbox (shorten messages).
• ns: check for new messages among several mboxes.
• me: MIME-encode message headers.

For each message, the mk command writes tab-separated values of some of its headers. This set of headers and the maximum length of each of them can be specified with -0 option. In addition to message headers, ~subject (more compact subject header with thread indentation), ~size (message size), and ~date (receiving date) can also be given. Each line begins with the value of the status header of the message (N if it is missing) and its message number. Neatmail assumes that the status of a message, if present, is one or two capital letters (the first letter may be N for new, R for read, and O for old; the second letter, if present, may indicate user-defined categories). This is an example invocation of mk:

$ neatmail mk -0 10from:20~subject: -st test/test.mbox N00000 [A [email protected]] [Message from A ] N00001 [B [email protected]] [Message from B ] N00002 [C [email protected]] [Message from C ]

The ex command reads a list of commands from the standard input and executes them on a given mbox file. It ignores all input lines except those beginning with a colon or a capital letter. Lines beginning with a capital letter like "R100 ...", change the value of the status header of the message whose number follows the letter. It also marks the current message. Lines beginning with a colon are named commands. The list of named commands are as follows:

• rm: remove the message.
• cp: copy the message to another mbox.
• mv: move the message to another mbox.
• hd, set: change the value of the given header of the message.
• ft, filt: filter the message through the given command.
• w: write the mbox.
• g, g!: ex-like global command.
• tj: join threads by modifying "Reply-To" headers.
• ch: chop the message at the specified offset in kilobytes.

These commands act on the current message by default (if applicable), but different messages may be specified using ex-like addresses. For instance, "2,5rm" removes messages 2 through 5. Addresses may contain search patterns, like "/pattern/rm", in which the pattern is a POSIX extended regular expression (the same applies to global command patterns like "%g/pattern/rm"). Search patterns are matched to the subject field of message headers, except when the pattern is "^field: value", in which it is matched against the specified header field instead.

In the following example, ex removes message 1, moves all messages whose subjects match ".neatmail." to mail.mbox file, and updates the mbox.

$ neatmail ex new.mbox <<EOF O000 O001 :rm R003 R002 N004 :%g/^subject:.neatmail./mv mail.mbox :w EOF

SUGGESTED USAGE

Generate a message listing (see mk options): $ neatmail mk -st -r inbox >inbox.nm

Open inbox.nm in an editor, change the status field of messages, and append ex commands.

Page, reply, or forward messages (see pg options): $ neatmail pg -m -h from: -h subject: -h to: -h cc: 23@inbox >mail

Execute the commands specified in inbox.nm: $ (cat inbox.nm; echo ":w") | neatmail ex inbox

It is more convenient to place these commands in a script. For fetching and sending messages, I use https://github.com/aligrudi/neatpop3 and https://github.com/aligrudi/neatsmtp.

LARGE MBOXES

Mbox files can gradually get very large, particularly because of messages with large attachments. This makes Neatmail commands slow. To reduce the size of such files, I move old messages to new, archival mboxes using :mv ex command. Then, I use the pn command to obtain smaller versions of these mbox files by removing message bodies and unnecessary headers (I use a Makefile to update them automatically):

$ neatmail pn -H -s0 old >old.i

Note that the original messages are kept just in case their contents are needed. Neatmail commands can read multiple mbox files. This makes it possible to generate a mail listing of the main mbox and pruned files:

$ neatmail mk -m6 -st -r inbox old.i >inbox.nm

The -m option forces mk to include the first few letters of the file that contains this message, like "[email protected]", which means the 20th message in the old.i mbox file (it does so only for messages not in the first given mbox file). To obtain the contents of the message, the original file can be read. For instance, the following command prints the 20th message in old:

$ neatmail pg 20@old

To make pg faster for large mbox files, pn includes a Neatmail-Source header to indicate the exact position of the original message (before pruning). When accessing the message, pg reads it from the location indicated by Neatmail-Source, if the header is present and -s is provided. Because the offset of the message is stored in Neatmail-Source, the whole mbox need not be read and it is much faster (compare pg -s [email protected] and pg 20@old in the above example).