how to truncate email (with procmail?)

Bogus8 · 07-13-2008, 05:37 PM

I'm looking to use fetchmail to recieve my email from my ISP and then truncate most of them down to like 150 characters and then forward it back out.

I'm assuming procmail is the best middle step there for that truncating but I can't seem to figure out the best way to do it.

Mr. C. · 07-14-2008, 01:10 AM

This is going to be a little tricky.

The body of email includes the Headers and the Body Text. Do you want headers included (without those, you don't see things like From:, Subject:, Date:, etc.

The body of email is often mime encoded, and just truncating will likely not give you the results you want. Only for plain text (non-mime encoded) mail will the results be generally useful.

Can you describe what you end goal is ?

Bogus8 · 07-14-2008, 03:00 AM

Guess, that would make more sense...

I'm making a poor man's blackberry... I get unlimited incoming text messages on my phone. I'm limited at 160 characters per message and I really don't want to get multi-part messages for long emails. I just mainly want to snag the subject and what else will fit from the body till the 160 limit. It all goes back out via ISP's SMTP server (my cell company gives me an email address to send me text msg's).

Hopefully that will help figure out what I'm doing

Mr. C. · 07-14-2008, 03:21 AM

That's what I was thinking you were doing.

There are numerous MIME tools available for perl (and other languages too). You could create a stripper app, and use procmail to call it.

Bogus8 · 07-14-2008, 11:46 AM

Yeah, I figured I'd need to call an app... hoping I wouldn't need to write one in perl or something... I can do some bash scripting but I haven't don't much perl yet. My past experience says Perl and I don't get along

unSpawn · 07-14-2008, 12:26 PM

Thinking about whipping up a procmail recipe: given a single e-mail message, then piping it through 'formail -k -X Subject:' will strip off all headers except the subject, then piping it through 'xargs' will give you one space separated string, then piping it through cut will cut it off at $charcount (rather than using string=${string:0:169}, then stripping string=${string//Subject: /} will give you the whole onehundredandsixty chars to e-mail back out. Could be a very small shell script.

Mr. C. · 07-14-2008, 01:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unSpawn

Thinking about whipping up a procmail recipe: given a single e-mail message, then piping it through 'formail -k -X Subject:' will strip off all headers except the subject, then piping it through 'xargs' will give you one space separated string, then piping it through cut will cut it off at $charcount (rather than using string=${string:0:169}, then stripping string=${string//Subject: /} will give you the whole onehundredandsixty chars to e-mail back out. Could be a very small shell script.

Right, but this isn't the issue. The issue is that the first portion of the body of an email can be all MIME headers and sections. For example:

Code:

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0006_01C8E011.A194AB80
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-2"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

This is 170 characters. It is not until *after* those headers is there anything interesting:

Code:

Good evening.

Wanted!

But it may not be that way either. The text/plain portion could be at the end of the mime encapsulation, and one might end up with this:

Code:

UEsDBBQAAgAIAIBR5jhVga4fdJ4AAACkAAAIAAAAZmlsbS5zY3Lst3OUsD3TJ9i2bdu27e67bdu2
bdu2bdvuvtu27d7n/d5vsDs7O7t/zjn7O6euSlKVSiWppHLJasYDAAMAAID8Q7+/AADtAP+GAMD

So the problem is not trivial.

unSpawn · 07-14-2008, 09:29 PM

Clearly I read over the "that being not the issue" part. Still should be doable either using some procmail recipe from here or here or your "stripper app" as you already suggested.

Mr. C. · 07-14-2008, 09:57 PM

Looks good - I haven't spent much time with procmail, so didn't know what capabilities it had. Good reference, thanks.

Bogus8 · 07-14-2008, 10:26 PM

I didn't fall out... just reading reading here.

Bogus8 · 07-14-2008, 11:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unSpawn

Clearly I read over the "that being not the issue" part. Still should be doable either using some procmail recipe from here or here or your "stripper app" as you already suggested.

I read through all that and then come across the last part of that first page which is EXACTLY what I'm doing! Granted I still need to research it more as I don't really get how it all goes together and I want to do some crazy stuff where I can query a database via a text message sent to my email... so I'll need to learn more about how to decode the body and recognize "commands" to do that with.