Utility for extracting MIME attachments

Question

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.

Via another question I came across http://www.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 '12 at 05:52

score 41 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 23 '19 at 00:08

41

munpack from mpack worked for me

In Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mpack
munpack -f mime-attachments-file

edited Jan 23 '19 at 00:08

Chris Lamb

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answered Feb 06 '13 at 08:19

DmitrySandalov

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Overall a nice solution. Still, as of version 1.6, it does not cope correctly with `=` 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: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647180 – tripleee Oct 23 '14 at 05:35
Did not recognize the filename of my pdf attachement. – bodo Feb 28 '21 at 08:26

score 20 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 29 '12 at 11:04

20

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.

answered Mar 29 '12 at 11:04

larsks

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`sudo apt-get install maildir-utils && mu extract -a ` – Richard Hansen Sep 20 '13 at 20:35
`mu: error: init_mime_msg: cannot construct mime message for noname.eml` – Nicolas Raoul Oct 27 '14 at 06:43
4

If that's a question, you probably want to post an actual question. This answer is over two years old. – larsks Oct 28 '14 at 00:48
This is the tool of choice I would say. You can even select the attachement by regular expression. Cf. https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/cheatsheet.html – bodo Feb 28 '21 at 08:28

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 23 '14 at 03:38

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.

score -3 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 30 '15 at 06:40

-3

mpack tools, and munpack
GNU base64 decoder
mimedecode
mha-decode
UUDeview
OpenSSL

edited Jul 30 '15 at 06:40

DanAlexson90

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answered Mar 29 '12 at 16:08

Lazy Badger

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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 '12 at 17:35

Utility for extracting MIME attachments

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