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 THIS VERSION

Version 5.3030: Tue Dec 21 2004
- Improved test failure reporting
- Fixed version numbers, which were incompatible with some modules.
- Cleaned up code a bit


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.

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

To use this program, you will need to install:

- Mail::Mbox::MessageParser: required
- Date::Parse: required
- 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

You should be prompted to install modules automatically when you run "perl
Makefile.PL".


INSTALLATION

=> On Non-Windows (Unix/Cygwin/etc.) systems:

To install this package, change to the directory where you unarchived this
distribution and type the following:

  perl Makefile.PL
  make
  make test
  make install

You can install this package into a non-default location by appending one of
the following to the "perl Makefile.PL" command:

- "PREFIX=/installation/path" (for installation into a custom location),
- "INSTALLDIRS=site" (for installation into site-specific Perl directories)
- "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
output files for the test, which are located in t/temp and noted in the test
output when the test fails. Also email the output of running the particular
subtest with the -D flag. e.g.:

  ./blib/script/grepmail -D --help > test_name.debug

If the first date_manip test case fails, you are in a timezone that
Date::Manip does not yet support.  You will need to 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 <mds@helices.org> 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.


COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1998-Sep 1 2000 Broc Seib. Copyright (c) Sep 1 2000-2004 David
Coppit. All rights reserved, save those granted by the license.


LICENSE

This code is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  See
the file LICENSE included in the distribution.


AUTHOR

David Coppit <david@coppit.org>
