textmail - Mail filter to replace MS Word/HTML attachments with plain text
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
attachmentsMS 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 allapplication/*
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.
textmail is written in Perl and executes several external programs. It should run on any system with the following software:
- perl (v5.14 or later)
- docx2txt
- antiword
- catdoc
- xlsx2csv
- xls2csv
- pdftotext
- lynx
- mktemp
textmail does not require any non-standard Perl modules.
There is a manual entry:
- textmail(1) - the textmail(1) manpage
URL: https://raf.org/textmail
GIT: https://github.com/raforg/textmail
GIT: https://codeberg.org/raforg/textmail
Date: 20230508
Author: raf <[email protected]>