reformail - reformat mail

SYNOPSIS

reformail [-d] -s program arg arg ...

reformail -D len filename

reformail -x header: -x header: ...

reformail -X header: -X header: ...

reformail [options] ...

DESCRIPTION

The reformail program reads a message on standard input, reformats it in some way, and writes the message to standard output.

Splitting mailboxes into individual messages

The -s option splits the mbox-formatted mailbox file on standard input into individual messages. The specified external program is executed for each message. The contents of each individual message will be provided to the program on standard input.

If the FILENO environment variable is set to a number, reformail will consecutively increment the FILENO environment variable each time the program is executed for each individual message.

If FILENO is not set, it's initial value will be "000". If FILENO is set to a non-numeric value, FILENO will remain unchanged.

Detecting duplicate messages

The -D option implements a simple way to delete duplicate messages in incoming mail. filename is a file that will be approximately 'len' bytes long. This file will be used by reformail to contain a list of message IDs seen in recent mail. reformail reads the message on standard input. If the message has a Message-ID: header that's already in the cache file, reformail terminates with the exit code set to 0. Otherwise, reformail terminates with the exit code set to 1.

Extracting headers

The -x and -X options extract the indicated headers from the message, and print them to standard output. Multiple -x and -X options can be specified at the same time, and may be intermixed.

The -x option extracts and prints the contents of the header. The -X option prints the name of the header as well.

In all other situations, reformail will simply copy the message on its standard input to the standard output, reformatting the message as follows:

OPTIONS

AUTOREPLIES

The -r option generates a set of headers for an automatic reply to the message, instead of producing just a reformatted copy of the message. As an enhancement, the -r option is smart enough to be able to properly generate an auto-reply to either an E-mail message, or a Usenet message ( reformail will generate both an In-Reply-To: and References: header).

The To: header is set to the apparent sender of the message. To determine the sender of the message, reformail prefers to look at machine-generated headers, such as Errors-To: and Return-Path:, instead of user-generated headers, such as From: or Reply-To:.

The -t option makes reformail use user-generated headers instead of machine-generated headers.

The -ra option copies To: headers from the original message into the auto-reply. The -rA option copies To: and Cc: headers.

Normally, the contents of the original message are removed. The -k option copies the contents of the original message, which each line prefixed by "> ". Use the "-p" option to specify a different prefix.

The contents of the message are preceded by a salutation specified by the -P option. If not specified, the salutation defaults to "%F writes:%n". Within the salutation, each occurrence of % followed by another character is replaced by some information from the original message, as follows:

BUGS

For the -a, -A, and -I options, a space after the header name and the colon is considered to be a non-empty field.

Do not provide the same header to more than one family of header-modifying options, such as -u/-U and -a/-A. Doing so yields unpredictable results. If you have a need to do so, run reformail several times (use a pipe, perhaps).

SEE ALSO

courier(8), sendmail(8), mailbot(1), maildrop(1)