Better debugging tools can help us understand what's going on with MIME
messages. A python scrap i wrote a couple years ago named
printmimestructure has been very useful to me, so i thought i'd share
it.
It reads a message from stdin, and prints a visualisation of its structure, like this:
0 dkg@alice:~$ printmimestructure < 'Maildir/cur/1269025522.M338697P12023.monkey,S=6459,W=6963:2,Sa' └┬╴multipart/signed 6546 bytes ├─╴text/plain inline 895 bytes └─╴application/pgp-signature inline [signature.asc] 836 bytes0 dkg@alice:~$
It is being published in the notmuch
repository, under devel/
git clone git://notmuchmail.org/git/notmuchls -l notmuch/devel/printmimestructure
It feels silly to treat this \~30 line script as its own project, but i don't know of another simple tool that does this. If you know of one, or of something similar, i'd love to hear about it in the comments (or by sending me e-mail if you prefer).
If it's useful for others, I'd be happy to contribute
printmimestructure to a project of like-minded tools. Does such a
project exist? Or if people think it would be handy to have in debian, i
can also package it up, though that feels like it might be overkill.
and oh yeah, as always: bug reports, suggestions, complaints, and patches are welcome :)
(2013-10-09: updated to note change of location of the script, thanks to the notmuch team for adopting it)