REad man formail, and look at the -m switch.
This may work under some circumstances, but it's not general at all.
Alas.
Here's an example of the kind of thing that causes problems
with formail. Let me explain it -- begins with a little piece
of the digest table of contents, then the listproc packaging,
then the 1st message -- which happens to contain a forwarded
message.
....
4) Re: Peace Process Shennanigans
by mxyzptlk
----__ListProc__NextPart__869544069434772034
Content-Type: multipart/digest; boundary="--__ListProc__NextPart____foo-STUDIE
S__digest_277"
----__ListProc__NextPart____IRISH-STUDIES__digest_277
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 08:37:44 -0500
From: xxxxxxxx
To: foo-studies(_at_)ptomaine
Subject: Imirce Homepage
Message-ID: <v03110701affa68268c69(_at_)[128(_dot_)887(_dot_)887(_dot_)887]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 22:19:13 -0400
Reply-To: foo
Sender: foolist
Precedence: first-class
=46rom: somebody
To: brinleer, jnorsted
Cc: 10 lines of
stuff
I had to delete
Subject: Imirce Homepage
Mime-Version: 1.0 4) Re: Peace Process Shennanigans
by mxyzptlk
----------------------- Message requiring your approval --------------------=
--
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Disposition: inline
=46rom: somebody
Subject: Imirce Homepage
....
It's not the only example of this, just one of the ugliest.
"burst" can't deal with this form of listproc digest at all.
It does, however, cheerfully whack the digest at the "Message requiring"
line above. Sometimes formail will split the forwarded message
(a forwarded message like this above, with 3 sets of address) up
into 3 messages; at the moment, it's just splitting into 2 (maybe it helps
that the forwarder's software is making a mess out of the word "From:").
Since the forwarded message often contains more header info than
the digest-formatted messages, I don't see how I can get formail -m <>
to do something reasonable (consistently).
Maybe the problem here is that formail really isn't designed to solve
this problem. It happens to be able to give it a try, which is
good almost all the time, but it's
really meant for something else. It doesn't know about structured messages.
(Or it doesn't know much ....).
I've downloaded the "splitdigest" package that another poster
mentioned & will have a look at that. But maybe it's more of a perl
project in this day & age & I should just make one. It sure would
be nice if formail would do the whole job tho, since often the
messages from a digest are "damaged" & need the toolkit formail
provides to turn them back into processable messages (put in to:, from,
fix up subject lines, bounce spam &c).