Am looking for an email client that will do the following

Drop attachments into a particular folder
Save body of email as a txt file into a particular folder [using filename as subjectline of email]

Be great if this could be automated without any input from the user.

Have tried kmail, but ran into encoding issues with saving of the body of the email as a txt file. (Returns were not held, gobbydegook, etc)

I have an issue of people keep sending me long body emails (ie: not as an attachment) and need a way to keep the paragraphs, spacing, etc as it is into a txt file.

Wondered if any one else managed to automate their emails so attachments are downloaded automatically to a folder (so you can grab ex: another program or view via konsole), with the body of the email saved as txt automatically.

Be great if I could also automate the printing out of the first page with the name/s of the attachment listed on the 1st page.

ozfly

You can't just save MIME attachments as a text file.
They are encoded data, usu Base64 coding.
Better to save the entire email in a store and copy a stripped version back to the main store.

Probably better to do this at the mail server..

i'm not sure, but take a look at sylpheed, and sylpheed-claws. They might do something you need.

Thanks for your reply peter,
Its going over my head.

I use the isp mail server and I was hoping that one could simply (like outlook express) just save text (without html coding, etc) as a txt file.
Guess its not possible at this point of time.

Linux Thunderbird also rendered text useless with HTML formating and square boxes throughout. with no paragraphs etc.
Will now try wine/codeweavers to run Eudora.

All suggestions welcomed. At the moment I've got to keep a window box for emails, not the idea setup.
Am running debian sarge.

whansard

thanks for the suggestion! am off to try it out. will post outcome here.

I use Thunderbird 1.0. When I do "File - Save As - File", or ctrl-s, it saves the message as a plain text file that I can open in gedit. All header are there as well as the attachment in asci format. Don't know if this helps.
You say you tried this & got "square boxes throughout". What are you using to view the file that you save?

Automation with thunderbird:

Use the Thunderbird Filters option to divert your mail to various Local Folders sub folders, from there you can use other text handling methods to parse the:

.thunderbird/default/???/Mail/Local Folders/xxx(subfolder file)

This will not be any help with encoded documents, for those you will need something like perl mailtools and fetchmail.

A convenient way to transfer html content from an email to a document is simply to cut and paste from Thunderbird into OpenOffice.

I found this Googling for "script remove email attachments debian"..

http://mailtools.anomy.net/sanitizer.html
Uses procmail to do the dirty work.
That's installed for sure on your Sarge box..

Sorry, the most important thing I've seem to have omitted is that I'm trying to open the text file on a winbloze box; because my legacy app is not currently supported via wine/codeweavers at the present time.

So when you open the text file you get all the html code / squares / everything is run on, etc (can't seem to cut and paste in here as it automatically makes it behave). -- this happens in winbloze version of open office / M$word / notepad / wordpad / in my legacy app.

The email itself is plain text, but ends up with HTML encoding (M$ouLook I bet) when you save as, which is just really strange.
Its almost like a bastardized version of htm source code but worse. (this happened from kdemail/tbird)

I did consider manual cut and paste into Open Office, but thats really time consuming when one deals with 100+ emails a day.

Thanks to all for your help & suggestions.
Will tame this email beast as soon as I get some free time and post back here.