Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

FreeBSD Manual Pages

  
 
  

home | help 
decomposemail(1)	     General Commands Manual		decomposemail(1)

NAME
     decomposemail - decompose mailboxes into their component email messages

SYNOPSIS
     decomposemail [ -hrv ] [ -c num ] [ -l num ] [ -s num ] [ mbox... ]

DESCRIPTION
     decomposemail  disassembles  email mailboxes into their component messages,
     storing each message in a separate serialized file.   These  message  files
     can then be reassembled into new mailboxes sorted by date by a program such
     as recomposemail(1), or via standard UNIX commands.

OPTIONS
     The following options are supported:

     -c        Split the mailbox into num-message chunks, does not sort.

     -h        Help, just print an informational message, and exit.

     -l        Limit,  stop  processing  after num messages, does not count mes-
	       sages skipped with -s.

     -r        Recompose, ignored with -c.  The new mailbox  file  created  will
	       have the suffix ".sort".

     -s        Skip the first num messages.

     -v        Verbose, provide more feedback.

OPERANDS
     The following operands are supported:

     mbox      The  name (with optional path) of a standard Internet style mail-
	       box file.  "-" can be used for stdin (standard input),  which  is
	       also the default if no mbox argument is given.

USAGE
     decomposemail  is	used  to  break up standard Internet style mailbox files
     into serialized files, each holding one email message.  This is most useful
     when used with other programs such as recomposemail(1)  or  sortmail(1)  to
     reassemble  the  message  files into new mailboxes.  The serialization used
     provides for easy ordering by date/time.  All work is done in  the  current
     directory.

     With  -r, a quick and dirty reassembly - sorted by date/time - is performed
     with no cleanup.

     When mbox arguments are specified that have suffixes ".Z" or ".gz" indicat-
     ing that the files are compressed with either compress(1) or gzip(1), these
     files will be uncompressed as they are read in.

EXAMPLES
     Break out the messages in the mailbox "zippy"  into  individual  serialized
     files:

	  decomposemail zippy

     Break  out the messages in the mailboxes "../listA" and "../listB" into in-
     dividual serialized files, then  recombine  them  into  two  new  mailboxes
     "listA.sort"  and "listB.sort", each sorted by date/time.	There will be no
     cleanup of the message files.  Per message progress will be reported:

	  decomposemail -rv ../listA ../listB

     Break out messages 201 through 300 in the mailbox "outbox" into  individual
     serialized files:

	  decomposemail -s 200 -l 100 outbox

     Break  out messages from the standard input, and chunk them into serialized
     mailboxes each holding 50 messages.  The new mailboxes will each  have  the
     base name "stdin":

	  cat mbox.* | decomposemail -c 50

FILES
     mbox.YYYYMMDD.hhmmss.nnnnn
		   Serialized  files  created  for  each individual message in a
		   mailbox, where "mbox" is the name of the mailbox,  "YYYYMMDD"
		   is  the  year,  month, and day, "hhmmss" is the hour, minute,
		   and second, and "nnnnn" is a serial number.	 These	will  be
		   created in the current directory.

     mbox-nnnnn    Serialized  files created for each chunk of num messages when
		   the -c flag is specified, where "nnnnn" is  a  serial  number
		   starting  with "00001".  These will be created in the current
		   directory.

DIAGNOSTICS
     Returns 0 if no problems encountered.
     Returns non-zero for any errors encountered.

BUGS
     decomposemail is slow.

     Data at the beginning of a mailbox that does not appear to be  part  of  an
     email message will be silently discarded.

     decomposemail  looks  for	and  uses the GNU version of awk(1) where it can
     find it, but will default to whatever version  is	available.   Since  most
     non-GNU  versions	have  input  line length limitations, decomposemail will
     fold input lines that are too long when these other versions are used.

     With -r, a simplistic algorithm is used to recombine the  messages  into  a
     new mailbox, and may crash on very large numbers of messages.  If this hap-
     pens, use recomposemail(1).

SEE ALSO
     compress(1), gzip(1), recomposemail(1), sh(1), sortmail(1),
     "Toolman:	 Sorting and Archiving Email", ;login: magazine (USENIX Associa-
     tion), August 1998.

AUTHOR
     sortmail was written by Daniel E. Singer (a.k.a. Toolman) at the Department
     of Computer Science, Duke University.

Toolman 			  09 June 1998			decomposemail(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=decomposemail&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

home | help