detach.py

Configuration

The configuration file is in dead-simple INI-like file format:

[detach]
user=stuhlbein
maildir=/path/to/maildir/.INBOX/foo
with-read=false
pattern=%Y/%Y%m%d_{}
dir=/home/fsr/attachments/
url=https://www.ifsr.de/attachments/

The maildir setting configures where detach.py will look for mailman moderation emails. Note that it does not recurse into sub-directories, so you have to give the full path to the mailbox which contains those mails.

If with-read is true, then also read (seen in IMAP jargon) mails will be included in the search. This makes things considerably slower, as more mails have to be processed. Only after the mail has been opened and parsed, detach.py is able to determine whether it is a moderation notice from mailman or not. The check whether the mail has been marked as read is quick (it is contained in the file name), so it is preferable to pre-filter your mails using this setting.

pattern specifies where attachments will be saved. It is first passed through strftime(2) and then all occurences of {} are replaced by a name which is prompted from the user interactively.

The actual directory is built by prefixing the result of the pattern expansion with the dir setting. The mail also provides an URL where the attachments can be reached. The base URL is configured by the url setting and included in the mail with the expanded pattern appended to it.

In the optional [spam] section of the config file, commands which can be used to train spam and ham can be configured. Those have no defaults. Example for the sa-learn command:

[spam]
learn-spam=sa-learn --spam
learn-ham=sa-learn --ham

The commands receive the message to learn on stdin. The options are in shell syntax, i.e. to pass foo bar as one argument use command "foo bar". For more infos on the exact syntax, see the shlex.split() Python documentation.

Usage

Call python3 detach.py and follow the instructions on the screen. If the script does not produce any output, it has not found any mails matching the criteria.

Otherwise, it will ask you for each mailman moderation notice it found whether it shall process it further. If you agree, it will analyse the mail for attachments and list them to you.

If learn-spam has been configured, a third option (s) is available. In that case, the message is trained as spam and not processed otherwise.

It then asks you for a folder name to use (see the Configuration section for details) and stores the attachments in that folder. Afterwards, the original mail is re-sent without attachments but with a plaintext part put in front of the original content which indicates where the attachments can be found.