>This is tangentially related to nmh but I'd like to solicit some ideas >from nmh users. > >One of the advantages of the mh folder structure is that we can use >simple tools to process every message as a file.
I would suggest that while this is in theory true, the practical utility of this has dimished in recent years (by "recent years" I mean, "the last several decades"). Modern email sadly isn't text/plain in many cases, often it's HTML with embedded images and has one of a number of possible encodings. Regular Unix tools are just going to fall down on it. >Most of the time I am busy with extracting attachments, I have to put >them somewhere, give them (sometimes better) names, try to version >them in some cases etc. > >How are you dealing with this? Do you have a separate filesystem >tree to file the attachments? What I do is treat the mail store as the canonical repository. When I need an attachment, I decode it right then and usually store it in /tmp where I can view or possibly print it. If I need to modify that file long term then it gets filed away whereever such files go. I can't say it's ideal but it works for me. --Ken
