Hi there,
A friend has started sending text messages from her phone to my email
address. They arrive with a from: address of [email protected]
(where 1212121212 is her cell number) and I can reply to them and
that's all great, but they come annoyingly encumbered with a bunch of
T-Mobile .gif images and such clutter. The plain text of these
messages are only a few words, yet the email is 25kb in size because
of all these images!
If I look at the message source it shows rubbish like this:
------=_Part_1260035_17792989.1257702378190
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Location: 01smil
Content-ID: <0000>
Content-Disposition: inline
<html>
<head>
=09=09<title>T-Mobile</title>=20
=09=09<!--
=09=09=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
=09=09If you can read this text, but much of the message below
seems unread=
able, you might be using an e-mail program that does not work with
HTML.
=09=09=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D-->
=09=09<style type=3D"text/css">
<!--
=09=09.footer {
=09=09=09font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
=09=09=09font-size: 11px;
=09=09=09color: #555555;
=09=09=09text-decoration: none;
...
=09=09-->
=09=09</style>
=09</head>
=09<body marginwidth=3D"0" marginheight=3D"0" leftmargin=3D"0"
topmargin=3D=
"0" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff">
=09=09<table border=3D"0" width=3D"600" cellspacing=3D"0"
cellpadding=3D"0"=
All this to say, pretty much, "how are you? lol"! (and the above is
severely truncated - I only show it to show what a mess this is!)
What I find really aggravating about this is that if I click reply
then my mail reader will quote an HTML table (which T-Mobile used to
arrange their pretty graphics) and yet won't actually attach the
original graphics themselves, so I see this big ugly of quoted:
<dottedline350.gif>
<tmobilespace.gif>
<tmobilelogo.gif>
<tmobilespace.gif>
The great thing about these messages are that they appear to contain a
plain text section:
------=_Part_1233335_2792974.3457702378123
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; name=Text01.txt
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Location: Text01.txt
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-ID: <555>
how are you? lol
------=_Part_1233335_2792974.3457702378123
So my big question is, can anyone suggest any tools for reformatting
the message as plain text only, and dumping all the crap?
I would love it if there's a tool that will just do the whole job for
me, but I'm prepared to hack together my own Bash script if necessary.
I really want to leave the headers intact, so that I can get maildrop
to perform the action, and it'll come into my mailbox still looking
like an ordinary email, but a plain text one, and with the subject and
reply-to address unchanged.
I really want to get maildrop to *still* send me the original message
with all the crap in it, but *also* this plain text copy - there are
indicators that the service is MMS based, so it's possible that
attachments could be sent, and I don't want to just dump a photo,
should one be sent.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I feel kinda ridiculous having to write such a long email - and
perhaps spend a bunch more time writing scripts - to handle such a
stupid thing. I guess the ridiculous thing is the cell company adding
all this junk to a simple text message. But I can really imagine this
formatting getting my goat enormously over time, and I don't want to
get annoyed at my friend over such a trivial thing.
Stroller.
