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README

textmail - Mail filter to replace MS Word/HTML attachments with plain text

Description

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.

Features

  • 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.

Requirements

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.

Documentation

There is a manual entry:

URL: https://raf.org/textmail
GIT: https://github.com/raforg/textmail
GIT: https://codeberg.org/raforg/textmail
Date: 20230508
Author: raf <raf@raf.org>