Friday, September 8, 2017

Extract many attachement from many mails in one go using ripmime

I was recently looking for a way to extract many attachments from a series of emails. I first had a look at the AttachmentExtractor thunderbird plugin, but it seems very old and not maintained anymore. So I've come up with another very simple solution that also works with any other mail client.

Just copy all the mails you want to extract attachments from to a single (temporary) mail folder, find out which file holds the mail folder and use ripmime on that file (ripmime is packaged for Debian). For my case, it looked like:

~ ripmime -i .icedove/XXXXXXX.default/Mail/pop.xxxx/tmp -d target-directory

Simple solution, but it saved me quite some time. Hope it helps !