reformime — MIME E-mail reformatting tool
reformime [options...]
reformime is a utility for reformatting MIME messages.
Generally, reformime expects to see an
RFC 2045
compliant message on standard input, except in few cases
such as the -m option.
If no options are given, reformime prints the MIME structure of the message. The output consists of so-called "MIME reference tags", one per line. For example:
1 1.1 1.2
This shows that the message contains two different MIME sections. The
first line of the MIME structure output will always contain "1", which refers
to the entire message.
In this case it happens to be a multipart/mixed
message. "1.1" refers to the first section of the multipart message, which
happens to be a
text/plain section. "1.2" refers to the second
section of the message, which happens to be an
application/octet-stream section.
If the message is not a MIME message, or it does not contain any attachments, reformime prints only "1", that refers to the entire message itself:
1
Here's the output from
reformime when the first part of the message was itself a
multipart/alternative section:
1 1.1 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.2
Arbitrarily complex MIME constructs are possible.
Parse a delivery status notification MIME message (RFC 1894). reformime expects to see on standard input a MIME message that consists of a delivery status notification, as defined by RFC 1894. reformime reads the message and prints on standard output a list of addresses and their corresponding delivery status, as specified in the delivery status notification. Each line printed by reformime consists of a delivery status, a space, and the address. reformime then terminates with a 0 exit status. reformime produces no output and terminates with an exit status of 1 if the standard input does not contain a delivery status notification.
Like the -d except that
reformime lists the address
found in the Original-Recipient: header,
if it exists.
Extract the contents of the indicated MIME section, and display it
on standard output.
The -s option is required when
-e is specified. If the
specified section or
sections use either the base64 or
quoted-printable encoding method,
reformime automatically
decodes it. In this case you're better off redirecting the standard output
into a file.
Display MIME information for each section. reformime
displays the contents of the
Content-Type: header, any encoding used,
and the character set.
reformime also displays the byte offset in the message
where each section starts and ends (and where the
actual contents of the section start, after skipping all the headers).
Create a multipart/digest MIME message digest.
Rewrite message, adding or standardizing RFC 2045 MIME headers.
Like -r but also convert 8bit-encoded
MIME sections to quoted-printable.
Like -r but also convert
quoted-printable-encoded MIME sections to
8bit, except in some situations, see below.
Unconditionally convert
quoted-printable-encoded MIME sections to
8bit, even when the resulting message may not
necessarily comply
with Internet message formatting standards.
See below for more information.
section
Display MIME information for this section only.
section is
a MIME specification tag. The -s option is required if
-e is also
specified, and is optional with -i.
Multiple sections may be specified by separating them with commas. reformime processes each section using the other options that were specified.
Extract the contents of the indicated MIME section to a file.
Pipe the contents of the indicated MIME section to a program.
The -x and -X options extract a specific
MIME section to a file or to a pipe to an external program.
Use the -s option to identify the MIME section
to extract. If the -s option is not specified,
every MIME section in the message is extracted, one at a time.
If -s lists multiple sections, each section gets
extracted separately.
quoted-printable and base64 encoding are
automatically decoded.
Interactive extraction. reformime prints the MIME
content type of each section. Answer with 'y' or 'Y' to extract the MIME
section. Specify the filename at the next prompt. reformime
prompts with a default filename.
reformime tries to choose the default
filename based on the MIME headers, if possible. If not, the default
filename will be attachment1.dat (if the -s option is not
specified, the next filename will be attachment2.dat,
and so on).
PREFIX
Automatic extraction. reformime automatically
extracts one or more MIME sections, and saves them to a file.
The filename is formed by taking
PREFIX, and appending the default filename to it.
Note that there's no space between "-x" and "PREFIX". For example:
reformime -xfiles-
This command saves MIME sections as
files-attachment1.dat, then
files-attachment2.dat, etc.
reformime tries to append the filename specified in the
MIME headers for each section, where possible.
reformime replaces all suspect characters with the
underscore character.
The -X option must be the last option to
reformime. reformime runs an external
program prog, and pipes the contents of the MIME section to
the program. reformime sets the environment variable
CONTENT_TYPE to the MIME content type. The environment
variable FILENAME gets set to the default filename of
reformime's liking. If the -s option is
not specified, the program runs once
for every MIME section in the message.
The external program, prog must terminate with a zero
exit status in order for reformime to proceed to the
next MIME section in the message (or the next section specified by
-s).
In any case, if prog terminates with a non-zero exit
status, reformime terminates with the exit status of
20 plus prog's exit status.
reformime extracts every MIME section in the message
unless the -s option is specified.
This includes even the text/plain MIME
content that usually precedes a binary attachment.
The -r option performs the following actions:
If there is no Mime-Version:,
Content-Type:, or
Content-Transfer-Encoding: header,
reformime adds one.
If the Content-Transfer-Encoding: header contains
8bit or raw, but only seven-bit data is
found, reformime changes
the Content-Transfer-Encoding header to
7bit.
-r7 does the same thing, but also converts
8bit-encoded content that contains eight-bit characters to
quoted-printable encoding.
-r8 does the same thing, but also converts
quoted-printable-encoded content to
8bit, except in some situations. The content remains
quoted-printable if converting it results in excessively
long lines of text.
-rU always converts
quoted-printable-encoded content to
8bit potentially resulting in excessively
long lines of text. The resulting message should not be resubmitted for
mail delivery, as a delivery failure may occur.
multipart/digest MIME digestsThe -m option creates a MIME digest.
reformime reads a list of filenames on standard input.
Each line read from standard input contains the name of a file that is
presumed to contain an RFC 2822-formatted message.
reformime splices all files into a
multipart/digest MIME section,
and writes it to standard output.
The following options do not read a message from standard input. These options process MIME headers via the command line, and are designed to be conveniently used by mail-handling scripts.
header"
Decode a MIME-encoded "header" and print the
decoded 8-bit content on standard output.
The decoding gets carried out as if the contents occurred in the
“Subject” header.
Example:
$ reformime -h '=?iso-8859-1?Q?H=F3la!?=' Hóla!
header"
Like -h except that header is
parsed as a list of
email addresses, like “From” or “To”.
text"
MIME-encode "text", and print the results
on standard output.
text"
Like the -o option, except that
text
is a structured header with RFC 2822 addresses.
charset"
Use charset as the character set
setting, by the
-h,
-H,
-o and
-O options.
This “undocumented” option reads a MIME message on standard input, and converts its contents to an UTF-8-encoded character stream, which is written to standard output.
The standard output receives a concatenated amalgam of the
headers and “text” MIME object data. It is meant to
be used as part of a generic search function. This option
decodes various kinds of header MIME encoding, the
quoted-printable and base64
transfer encodings of “text” MIME objects.
reformail(1), sendmail(8), mailbot(1), maildrop(1), maildropfilter(5), egrep(1), grep(1), sendmail(8).