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Finding and pretty-printing many emails

Posted on 2023-01-04

[This is a repost from my old Weblog - original publication date 2021-09-08.]

Back in 2020, we were one of many customers sold cars with undisclosed defects by a local car dealer.

We’re off to VCAT soon, and so I recently needed to print out a whole bunch of emails. But printing emails from mail clients is slow, and it’s easy to miss individual messages. So I sought to find a solution that used command-line tools to handle the task in bulk.

Unix to the rescue :)

UNIX - Live Free or Die

(I’m leaving aside the philosophical question of just how Unixy some of these tools are. I’d argue that despite the odd miss (like --exec options in mail searchers) they have the Unix nature by virtue of being somewhat single-focused, and pleasantly composable.)

Anyway, my approach was to break down the problem into the following steps:

1. Download a local copy of the mail.

2. Search the mail for the individual messages of interest.

3. Pretty-print the messages of interest.

4. Send the pretty-printed documents to the printer.

To download the email, I used mbsync. My email provider is Fastmail; I already use mbsync with mu4e for my own email so this was a natural step. The configuration I used is as follows:

IMAPAccount foo
Host mail.messagingengine.com
User foo@bayne.id.au
Pass REDACTED
Port 993
SSLType IMAPS
AuthMechs Login

IMAPStore foo-remote
Account foo

MaildirStore foo-local
SubFolders Legacy
Path ~/email/foo/
Inbox ~/email/foo/INBOX/

Channel foo
Master :foo-remote:
Slave :foo-local:
Patterns * INBOX
Create Slave
Sync All
Expunge Both
SyncState *

Having synchronised the mail with:

$ mbsync -c ~/email/foo foo

... the next step was to find the emails I was interested in.

This is where the email indexing tool mu came in. I’ve already initialised an email index in ~/email/ with mu init --maildir=~/email as part of my regular email setup, so all I needed to do was to find the files was to use mu along with GNU Parallel:

$ mkdir ~/tmp/mails
$ mu find --skip-dups to:REDACTED or subject:REDACTED --fields=l | parallel -N 1 cp {1} ~/tmp/mails

... where:

--fields=l

... just returns the full path to the email in question.

The next step was to install an email pretty-printer. I chose to use Nick Russler’s email-to-pdf-converter tool, which I installed along with wkhtmltopdf.

This produces pleasant-looking output out of the box, e.g.:

From: Duncan Bayne <duncan@bayne.id.au>
To: dhgbayne@fastmail.fm
Subject: Test 3
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2021 16:07:32 +1000

Testing, testing, one two three.

--
Duncan Bayne
+61 420 817 082 | https://duncan.bayne.id.au/

I usually check my mail every 24 - 48 hours.  If there's something
urgent going on, please send me an SMS or call me.

... becomes:

Email rendered into PDF

Pretty-printing the emails in PDF format was then just a matter of:

$ cd ~/tmp/mails
$ find . -type f -exec java -jar ~/bin/emailconverter-2.5.3-all.jar {} \;

Finally, then, all that remained was the fourth and final step: sending the PDFs to the printer:

$ find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec lpr {} \;

The end result is a stack of email hard copies, and a slightly more insistent low toner warning on my printer :)

Thanks to:

Wikimedia Commons for the Unix licence plate photo

Jonathan Leffler for the suggestion to use GNU Parallel.

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