Printing an mbox

Printing an mbox

[Alex]

Hi,

I have an email mbox with about 500 messages in it that I'd like to
print. Are there any command-line tools that I can use that take an
mbox as an input (or the individual mails split with formail) and
pretty-print them to a postscript file?

I was thinking of something like hypermail to convert it to HTML, but
there's too many additional modifications involved. I wished
Thunderbird would enable you to highlight multiple email messages and
print them all to one file (a postscript printer file), but it
doesn't.

Thanks for any ideas.
Best regards,
Alex

Re: Printing an mbox

[Adam T. Bowen]

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Hi,

The pine mail client (or alpine as it is now) allows you to select
multiple messages and then print them all at once (using "Apply->Print"
command after "Select"-ing messages). You can also configure your own
print commands in the configuration, so you could pipe the messages
through something to prettify them first, if you want. I don't print my
email so I haven't actually used it, so I have no idea what the actual
rendering of emails is like (unlikely that it will render HTML emails or
anything fancy by default).

I use thunderbird myself on some systems so I thought I'd give it a go
to see if I could make it print multiple messages. I selected ten
messages, clicked print, got a print preferences dialogue and clicked
okay. At that point it opened ten message windows, plus ten "printing"
dialogues, and crashed. Ho hum.

Cheers,

Adam

On 31/03/10 02:39, Alex wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have an email mbox with about 500 messages in it that I'd like to
> print. Are there any command-line tools that I can use that take an
> mbox as an input (or the individual mails split with formail) and
> pretty-print them to a postscript file?
> 
> I was thinking of something like hypermail to convert it to HTML, but
> there's too many additional modifications involved. I wished
> Thunderbird would enable you to highlight multiple email messages and
> print them all to one file (a postscript printer file), but it
> doesn't.
> 
> Thanks for any ideas.
> Best regards,
> Alex
> --
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Re: Printing an mbox

[Alex]

Hi,

> The pine mail client (or alpine as it is now) allows you to select
> multiple messages and then print them all at once (using "Apply->Print"
> command after "Select"-ing messages). You can also configure your own

Ugh, that sounds like quite a process for a large number of messages,
but good to know it exists.

I'm thinking about a simple perl script that grabs the headers I'd
like to include along with some basic HTML tags to make them look
better, along with some PRE tags to format the body, then running it
through html2ps or something..

Do you think that would work?

> I use thunderbird myself on some systems so I thought I'd give it a go

Yeah, I also had tried that, and disappointed to also see it crash and burn.

I recall doing it about fifteen years ago, but can't for the life of
me remember exactly how. I think it involved LaTeX or something, but
that would be entirely too involved for what I need now.

Thanks again,
Alex