Another problem in saving email

[Alexandra Zaharia]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:47 AM, thomas smith<valhalla2100 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hello
>
> Is it possible to batch save email without the html code?
>
> I subscribe to several Google Alerts and have been saving
> (when using Eudora on Windows XP) received email in
> files that include several emails according to the subject.
>
> Is this possible in the Linux world?  Just did a test and
> and the html code was included.
>
> Thanks
> Thomas

Please turn off HTML when posting to this list.

I would assume your e-mail client is Evolution, judging by the full headers.

If so, your e-mails are unfortunately in mailbox (mbox) format, in
~/.evolution/mail/local

The first step to save them as separate files would be to convert the
mailbox to a maildir (mdir). In other words, to break apart the huge
file into several smaller files -- one e-mail per file, of course.

To do this, there are some tools out there. One of them is mbox2mdir.
Get the source from here:

http://sageshome.net/oss/mbox2mdir.php

To compile it, run 'make' after you've extracted the contents of the
archive. AFAIK you just need  g++ to compile it.

Then the executable takes as input parameter the mailbox and the
output parameter is a directory where it will deposit the resulting
e-mails (in maildir format).

Now, it depends on you what part of the e-mail is relevant to you. You
can script yourself some tools that take out specific html tags or use
an existing one (although I doubt html2text will be of much help) or
tools that parse the headers in a manner according to your needs etc.