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Re: [Nmh-workers] Wishlist: Extracting Attachments from Email.

2004-11-23 15:33:02

Hi Valdis,

mhstore and a little scripting gets me the first half, it's the
editing the email to change the embedded file into a reference
that's the issue.

This *does* break horribly for digital signatures - I suspect that
both an S/MIME and a PGP signature would be invalidated by changing
the embedded file into a reference.

I expect they would.

Also, things get interesting if you try to forward the mail along with
the attachment - I do *not* think it would DTRT with the reference (in
other words, the recipient would just get a dangling reference, not
the file.

Probably, since the I'm happy for the reference to be to a local file as
opposed to, e.g. an FTP URL.

The forwarding problem is probably solvable, I suspect that the
digital signature one is *not*, unless you find a way to reconstitute
the original on a byte-per-byte basis (and making sure that for the
corner case of a PGP or S/MIME signature that actually covers a
*reference*, that we do *not* expand the reference as that will also
break the signature....)

For my purposes, essentially long-term archiving, I'm happy with editing
an email message, breaking the digital signatures, and I'm unlikely to
want to forward the email to anyone.  But I see your point.

I suppose a bit of an MIME-aware scripting language would do it.  Python
has its email package, used by Mailman amongst other things, but I'd
heard it isn't strictly conforming.

    http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-October/003336.html

Cheers,


Ralph.



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