Running "mail" from a shell script?

Jim Miller · 08-17-2006, 11:24 AM

I have procmail and spamassassin (under Fedora Core 4) diverting much of my spam into a folder where I can look at it later. What I'd like to have is a cron job that, every night, will create a "mail"-type listing of all the message summaries in that folder. What I want is the kind of summary you get when you first start "mail" -- message number, sender address, message date, message size, and message subject.

Is there a way to do this? The following comes pretty close:

Code:

echo 'q' | mail -f spam.folder > spam.output

but it only prints the information for the first 20 messages in the folder (you're supposed to interactively do a "z+" to see the next 20) and it's only displaying the first 20 characters of the message subjects (why it's doing this, I have no idea).

I suppose I could grep through the folder for "Subject:" lines or somesuch, but the output from mail is close enough that I'd like to use it if I can. Any thoughts?

spirit receiver · 08-17-2006, 02:51 PM

From "man mail":

Quote:

-H Print header summaries for all messages and exit.

Edit: Here mail is a link to nail, and that switch seems to be a nail extension. Maybe you should have a look for that program.

Jim Miller · 08-17-2006, 03:30 PM

That sounds like exactly what I want, but it's not available in "mail" under Fedora Core 4. (rpm: mailx-8.1.1-44) For whatever reason, I have a man page for mailx that lists the -H option, but it doesn't work with "mail". Is mailx hiding somewhere in my system, and I just haven't found it?

spirit receiver · 08-17-2006, 03:37 PM

I don't know anything about Fedora, but "rpm -lq mailx" will hopefully give you a list of all files delivered with that package.

Jim Miller · 08-17-2006, 04:45 PM

Here's what I get:

Code:

# rpm -lq mailx
/bin/mail
/etc/mail.rc
/usr/bin/Mail
/usr/lib/mail.help
/usr/lib/mail.tildehelp
/usr/share/man/man1/Mail.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/mail.1.gz

# /bin/mail -H 
/bin/mail: invalid option -- H
Usage: mail [-iInv] [-s subject] [-c cc-addr] [-b bcc-addr] to-addr ...
            [-- sendmail-options ...]
       mail [-iInNv] -f [name]
       mail [-iInNv] [-u user]

Sigh. Thanks for the help, in any case.

spirit receiver · 08-18-2006, 04:31 AM

As an alternative, consider using Perl and the Email::Folder module. See if you can get that module installed (from http://www.cpan.org/modules, try using the CPAN shell with "perl -MCPAN -e shell"). After that, it will only take a few lines of Perl code to do what you want.