[Alpine-info] Strip attachments from sent-mail

[jason-alpine-info at shalott.net]

> Hello list. Does anyone know of a simple way to strip attachments from 

> sent-mail? Either through Alpine or some other means. I'm using Maildir 

> by the way.


You can manually delete attachments from an individual message directly in 
Alpine.  While viewing a message, use ">" to go to the attachment screen, 
select each attachment and "D" to delete it.  (You'll get a message at 
this point about Saving the message, and you'll see a "S)ave" option on 
the screen -- do NOT use Save at this point...)  Jump back to the main 
message screen with "<", and _then_ "S"ave the message.  Save it back to 
the same folder it's already in ("sent-mail" or whatever).  The original 
copy will at this point be deleted (assuming the default "Save Will 
Delete"), and a new copy, with the attachments replaced by a short 
message, will be created in the same folder.  e"X"punge, and you're done.


If you want to do this to an entire mailbox, I don't think that Alpine can 
do it.  However, if you have raw filesystem access to the mailspool, and 
you're using Maildir, it's quite easy to script.

There are plenty of tools and modules out there that can strip MIME 
attachments.  One random example is: https://pldaniels.com/altermime/

Assuming you've installed altermime above, and assuming your sent-mail is 
in ${HOME}/Maildir/.sent-mail/, you could strip all the attachments with a 
command like:

 	find ${HOME}/Maildir/.sent-mail/{new,cur} -type f -exec altermime --removeall --input=\{\} \;

(Note that this will probably violate some of Maildir's atomicity 
guarantees (e.g., if the host crashes while this is running, a message may 
be corrupted; if you open the mailbox while a message is being processed, 
your mail reader may get confused; etc).  Working around this to preserve 
Maildir's atomicity guarantees is pretty straightforward, but left as an 
exercise to the reader...)


  -Jason