UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

see if you have mbpath installed (part of the cysrus package). This should enable you to find out the correct location of the users mail spool. Under that there may be hidden directories and files, so ls -a will help.

here is the man page for formail (sorry, I misspelled it earlier)
formail
which is probably what you will end up using as once you have the hang of it, it is so easy to script.

I have mbpath installed on the server. I ran it from command line as follows :

/usr/cyrus/bin/mbpath <users directory name from /var/spool/imap/user>

but i get the following message :

Invalid mailbox name: <directory name>

sorry if I've ran that wrong

formail as such doesn't really help here, it's useful for splitting an mbox file into individual messages and replacing headers, but I don't think you need either here.

A somewhat desperate but perhaps acceptable workaround would be to simply resend those messages. Some Received: headers will be added and you might get the wrong envelope sender, but those might not be of any importance to you.

sorry if this a dumb question but how can I resend the text files? :-)

If you have a file which contains a valid email message, just submit it with sendmail. It should have some headers, an empty line, and a body. I supply an example below.

Given a set of files like this, you can send them with sendmail:

Code:

for f in 9*; do  # loop over all files named 9* in current directory
  sendmail -oi recipient@example.net <"$f"
done

Here's what a simple email message looks like. It's just a text file.

Code:

From: Benevolent Sender <sender@example.org>
To: Happy Recipient <recipient@example.net>
Subject: This be a message
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000
X-Header: there can be random other headers

Hi there.  You have m@il! O_o

If there's a "From " line (without a colon) as the first line, you want to discard that somehow. sed '1{;/^From /d;}' would seem like a typical way to do that.

There are likely to be Received: headers and what not, but that's a basic simple message. If you have MIME structure, that adds some complexity as well, but fundamentally, SMTP mail is just a piece of basic 7-bit US-ASCII text. See the RFCs and various tutorials for more information.

Hi era

The for loop worked a treat :-) - thanks for all your help and assitance :-)