Avi Freedman's Tech and Biz Topics

on internet plumbing, gadgets, nerd herding, and other related topics

Stripmime (for Text Dinosaurs)

I’m a dinosaur. I like vi, elm, screen, and ssh. I should use mutt but mutt is NOT just like elm and I don’t really need IMAP. But mutt’s handling of MIME isn’t so great, and in general if I’m not online for real I won’t be looking at attachments anyway, though catdoc is still fun for catching the occasional Word doc that wasn’t Save-as’d and still has all of the revisions in it.

So what’s one to do?

I’ve been using stripmime for about 10 years.

Here’s one version.

I have procmail pipe messages with MIME attachments to stripmime, and it turns them all into URL-accessible files.

For example:

>>> application/vnd.ms-powerpoint component, message, part 2:
http://avi.freedman.net/attach/1116095935-bc93-830d-198c-800292311170/clueless-vendor-pitch.ppt
[this message stripped with stripmime]

You can send the message to someone else without moving 30MB objects around, but as long as you get the URL obfuscation right it’s just as secure.

And in an enterprise you can certainly save tons of bandwidth and storage (if you’re using WAN optimizaton boxes, at least it’ll save storage on the mail server).