I've been trying to remove the unneeded part of the header in stored e-mails so that they are easier to read. In DOS I can use rmheader.exe which will leave just a few parts such as "Subject:", "To:", "From:", "Date:", or whichever I specify. I am unable to find such a utility for linux. I tried sed, but that is very difficult for me and perhaps it is a bad approach for an amateur. (I'm still dizzy from that one!)

Can someone suggest a utility or script which I can use?

The e-mail files are in the form of sequential hex numbers eg "00001a.eml" but obviously i could change that if there was any advantage.

A little perl one-liner can do it with some ease:
This will print the modified message on standard output. You can re-direct that to a new file as you like, or if you prefer to modify the original file in-place like this:
Of course you don't need to type all that in every time. You can put it in a file, make that executable and use it like any other program:
Remove the -i from the first line if you don't want it to modify files in place.

Thankyou matthew4g,

I just tried that and it worked like a charm!

I don't know anything about perl, but now I have a little start to fool with in a useful way. This btw was my first post and boy am I pleased! Thanks again for going to the trouble of doing that script.

If you are going to start learning Perl I recommend you bookmark these:

http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Tutorials .

Enjoy

There's also a thing called formail, which is useful for manipulating mail headers and messages. I think it's part of procmail.

If you wanted to know the Bash or shell alternative, you can use grep to strip out some of the headers.

Something like this would work:

You could easily write a script to take command line arguments and or experiment with better ways to remove the fields you want, etc.

Actually, an even easier way with grep is to use egrep like this so you don't have to pipe to grep -v for each word you want to remove:

I just installed procmail to see if it has formail in the lib - it does. Actually procmail looks like a pretty useful package. Thanks for the tip Berhanie!

As for trickykid's suggestion of using grep and egrep, I had no idea that those utilities could be used in that fashion. I use a watered down (but extremely useful) version of those in DOS and they don't do anything like that. Jeesh! If you guys come up with any more suggestions, I won't get any work done ... :(

How about extracting email headers' IP and Domain values all dumped in a text file, how do I write the code?

I have tons of email messages that I need to extract and only need to know their IPs and domain names were found.