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I am looking for a command-line tool for Unix (ideally, available in a Debian / Ubuntu package) for extracting all MIME parts from a multipart email message (or the body from a singlepart with an interesting content-type, for that matter).

I have been using the mimeexplode tool which ships with the Perl MIME::Tools package, but it's not really production quality (the script is included as an example only, and has issues with what it regards as "evil" character sets) and I could certainly roll my own script based on that, but if this particular wheel has already been innovated, perhaps I shouldn't.

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  • Via another question I came across pldaniels.com/ripmime which looks very nice, but it's not available as an Ubuntu package as far as I can tell.
    – tripleee
    Jun 11, 2012 at 5:52

4 Answers 4

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41

munpack from mpack worked for me

In Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mpack
munpack -f mime-attachments-file
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  • Overall a nice solution. Still, as of version 1.6, it does not cope correctly with =<cr><lf> sequences in quoted-printable text (I get a spurious 0xFF byte for each escaped line break in the input). This seems to have been reported in 2011, but still not fixed: bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647180
    – tripleee
    Oct 23, 2014 at 5:35
  • Did not recognize the filename of my pdf attachement.
    – bodo
    Feb 28, 2021 at 8:26
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The mu project seems to include a mu-extract command that looks as if it might do what you want. And it appears to be available as an Ubuntu package already.

NB: I haven't actually used this tool myself.

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    sudo apt-get install maildir-utils && mu extract -a <file>
    – Richard Hansen
    Sep 20, 2013 at 20:35
  • mu: error: init_mime_msg: cannot construct mime message for noname.eml
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Oct 27, 2014 at 6:43
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    If that's a question, you probably want to post an actual question. This answer is over two years old.
    – larsks
    Oct 28, 2014 at 0:48
  • This is the tool of choice I would say. You can even select the attachement by regular expression. Cf. djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/cheatsheet.html
    – bodo
    Feb 28, 2021 at 8:28
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I needed to unpack a chrome dmp file in order to extract the minidump for analysis on Ubuntu 12.04.4. I found that the mime file had been written in DOS format despite being in a Linux environment, so neither mpack or maildir-utils worked out of the box. The following steps worked for me:

sudo apt-get install dos2unix mpack
cp chromium-renderer-minidump-c3303784f176fb58.dmp backup
dos2unix -f chromium-renderer-minidump-c3303784f176fb58.dmp
munpack chromium-renderer-minidump-c3303784f176fb58.dmp

The -f on dos2unix is required to force the conversion on a binary file. The maildir-utils mu program crashed trying to read the dmp file even after dos2unix conversion.

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-4
  • mpack tools, and munpack
  • GNU base64 decoder
  • mimedecode
  • mha-decode
  • UUDeview
  • OpenSSL
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    -1 I am familiar with all of these except mha-decode and mimedecode, and at least none of the others accept an email message as input, and produces its attachments as output. I will take a look at mha-decode and mimedecode, still.
    – tripleee
    Mar 29, 2012 at 17:35

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