grepmail - search mailboxes for a particular email Grepmail searches a normal, gzip'd, bzip'd, or tzip'd mailbox for a given regular expression, and returns those emails that match it. Piped input is allowed, and date and size restrictions are supported, as are searches using logical operators. New in version 5.00: - grepmail is now orders of magnitude faster for mailboxes which have very large (>30MB) emails in them - "grep" is now used to find the start of emails, if it is installed. For mailboxes with large emails in them, this can speed things up by about 5x. - Reduced memory consumption by about 3 times. - -- now marks the end of options and the beginning of folders - -f now reads patterns from a file like GNU grep does. - Added smail compatibility. - Date specifications without times (e.g. "today") are interpreted as midnight of the given day instead of the current time of that day. - Fixed -i when used with -Y -- it was always case sensitive before. - Updated t/functionality.t to avoid running gzip-related test cases when gzip is not installed on the system. - Improved some error messages so that they prepend "grepmail: " as they should - The "**" prefix on warnings has been changed to "grepmail:" - Cleaned up some warnings about ambiguous hash values - Added a warning about the version of perl required for new pattern features - -t flag renamed to -j - Fixed broken Gnus support - Improved test case for Gnus SOME NOTES perl version: If you plan to use advanced pattern features such as "(?>...)", you will need to make sure that your version of perl supports them. -s flag: *** WARNING *** As of version 4.91, the semantics of -s has changed. For example: grepmail -s 1234 file now matches emails whose size is exactly 1234 bytes. Use grepmail -s '<1234' file if you prefer the older semantics. Caching: Caching appears to be working, but is currently disabled by default because the speedup is only 10-20%, and because it requires a file to be created in the user's directory. I'm hoping that the caching infrastructure can lead to further improvements. For example, we should cache the boundaries of attachments for the -M flag. Also, the current self-rolled implementation may be better served using Cache::FileCache instead. Complex queries: The -E flag allows you to perform complex searches involving logical operators. For example, $email_header =~ /^From: .*\@coppit.org/ && $email =~ /grepmail/i will find all emails which originate from coppit.org (you must escape the "@" sign with a backslash), and which contain the keyword "grepmail" anywhere in the message, in any capitalization. NOTE: -E support is experimental right now. I'm looking for feedback on the following: - Do you like the feature? - Do you like the Perl-based syntax? Is there an alternative which is easier? - How should date and size constraints be integrated? Should they be "variables", a la: "$email =~ /grepmail/ && $date <= 'sep 20 1998' || $size > 50000"? - Should -i, -h, and -b be supported in conjunction with -E? (Where "-h pattern" would mean augmenting the -E pattern with "$email_header =~ /pattern/ && ") - -S ignores signatures. If/when this feature is implemented for -E, should it be "global" for all $email_body matches, or should it be possible to specify this for each $email_body match? For example, one can append an "i" modifier to an individual pattern match to make it case-insensitive. Should there be a standard way of dealing with such "global" pattern matching options on an individual pattern match basis? Message IDs: NOTE: For emails without message ids, grepmail will use Digest::MD5 to compute a hash based on the email header. If you don't have Digest::MD5, grepmail will just use the header itself as the messsage id. The Digest::MD5 checksum takes a little while to compute, but saves a lot of space. Currently there is no easy way to choose space over time. Let me know if this is a problem. MODULE DEPENDENCIES - Mail::Mbox::MessageParser: required - Date::Parse: required if you want to search based on date (-d) - Date::Manip: required if you want to search using complex date specifications (-d) - Digest::MD5: not required, but can help grepmail use less memory if you are checking for unique emails (-u) and your emails don't have a Message-Id header The modules can be found here: Mail::Mbox::MessageParser: http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=MailMboxMessageParser Date::Parse (in TimeDate): http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=TimeDate Date::Manip: http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=DateManip Digest::MD5: http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Digest-MD5 Installation can also be done automatically using the CPAN module: perl -MCPAN -e 'install Mail::Mbox::MessageParser' perl -MCPAN -e 'install Date::Parse' perl -MCPAN -e 'install Date::Manip' perl -MCPAN -e 'install Digest::MD5' INSTALLATION => On Non-Windows systems: % perl Makefile.PL % make % make test % make install The "perl Makefile.PL" command will prompt you for an installation location if you run it interactively, and will use the default values if it is run non-iteractively. You can force it to run non-interactively by specifying either "PREFIX=/installation/path" (for installation into a custom location), "INSTALLDIRS=site" (for installation into site-specific Perl directories), or "INSTALLDIRS=perl" (for installation into standard Perl directories). If make test fails, please see the INSTALLATION PROBLEMS section below. => On Windows systems: - Just copy "grepmail" to a place in your path. You may want to rename it "grepmail.pl" if you've associated .pl files with perl.exe. CONFIGURATION You may want to set your MAIL environment variable so that grepmail will know the default location to search for mailboxes. If you are terribly concerned about performance, you may want to modify the value of the variable READ_CHUNK_SIZE located in the code. This variable controls how much text is read from the mailbox at a time. If the value is set to 0, the entire file is read into memory. (There is no user-visible option for setting this value.) You may also want to hack the code to not use Digest::MD5, thereby trading space for time. If you frequently use the same set of flags, you may wish to alias "grepmail" to "grepmail -flags" within your command interpreter (shell). See the documentation for your shell for details on how to do this. INSTALLATION PROBLEMS If "make test" fails, run make test TEST_VERBOSE=1 and see which test(s) are failing. Please email, to the address below, the test##.stderr and test##.stdout files for the test, which are located in t/results. Also email the output of running the test with the -D flag. e.g.: blib/script/grepmail library -D -d "before July 9 1998" t/mailarc-1.txt \ > test##.debug If you see errors about your timezone, and you are in an uncommon timezone, it may be the case that Date::Manip does not support your timezone yet. Try this: perl -MDate::Manip -e 'print "TIMEZONE: ".&Date::Manip::Date_TimeZone."\n"' If you get an error, contact the author of Date::Manip. For other bugs, see the section REPORTING BUGS below. DOCUMENTATION Just "perldoc grepmail". After installation on Unix systems, you can also do "man grepmail". HOMEPAGE Visit http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/ for the latest version, mailing lists, discussion forums, CVS access, cool utilities, and more. TODO/WISHLIST - Michael D. Schleif suggested grepmail have support for compressed mail directories. Adding support for this is not easy, and I'm not sure many people would benefit from the feature. Let me know if you too want this support, and I may implement it. REPORTING BUGS You can report bugs at http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=2207. Please attach the output of running grepmail with the -D switch. If the bug is related to processing of a particular mailbox, try to trim the mailbox to the smallest set of emails that still exhibit the problem. Then use the "anonymize_mailbox" program that comes with grepmail to remove any sensitive information, and attach the mailbox to the bug report. PRIMARY AUTHOR Written by David Coppit (david@coppit.org, http://coppit.org/), with the generous help of many kind people. See the file CHANGES for detailed information. LICENSE This code is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). See http://www.opensource.org/gpl-license.html and http://www.opensource.org/.