Many of the options and arguments are analogous to those of grep.
pattern
The pattern to search for in the mail message. May be any Perl regular expression, but should be
quoted on the command line to protect against globbing (shell expansion). To search for more than one
pattern, use the form "(pattern1|pattern2|...)".
Note that complex pattern features such as "(?>...)" require that you use a version of perl which
supports them. You can use the pattern "()" to indicate that you do not want to match anything. This is
useful if you want to initialize the cache without printing any output.
mailbox
Mailboxes must be traditional, UNIX "/bin/mail" mailbox format. The mailboxes may be compressed by
gzip, bzip2, lzip or xz, in which case the associated compression tool must be installed on the system,
as well as a recent version of the Mail::Mbox::MessageParser Perl module that supports the format.
If no mailbox is specified, takes input from stdin, which can be compressed or not. grepmail's behavior
is undefined when ASCII and binary data is piped together as input.
-a
Use arrival date instead of sent date.
-b
Asserts that the pattern must match in the body of the email.
-B
Print the body but with only minimal ('From ', 'From:', 'Subject:', 'Date:') headers. This flag can be
used with -H, in which case it will print only short headers and no email bodies.
-C
Specifies the location of the cache file. The default is $HOME/.grepmail-cache.
-D
Enable debug mode, which prints diagnostic messages.
-d
Date specifications must be of the form of:
- a date like "today", "yesterday", "5/18/93", "5 days ago", "5 weeks ago",
- OR "before", "after", or "since", followed by a date as defined above,
- OR "between <date> and <date>", where <date> is defined as above.
Simple date expressions will first be parsed by Date::Parse. If this fails, grepmail will attempt to
parse the date with Date::Manip, if the module is installed on the system. Use an empty pattern (i.e.
-d"") to find emails without a "Date: ..." line in the header.
Date specifications without times are interpreted as having a time of midnight of that day (which is
the morning), except for "after" and "since" specifications, which are interpreted as midnight of the
following day. For example, "between today and tomorrow" is the same as simply "today", and returns
emails whose date has the current day. ("now" is interpreted as "today".) The date specification "after
July 5th" will return emails whose date is midnight July 6th or later.
-E
Specify a complex search expression using logical operators. The current syntax allows the user to
specify search expressions using Perl syntax. Three values can be used: $email (the entire email
message), $email_header (just the header), or $email_body (just the body). A search is specified in the
form "$email =~ /pattern/", and multiple searches can be combined using "&&" and "||" for "and" and
"or".
For example, the expression
$email_header =~ /^From: .*\@coppit.org/ && $email =~ /grepmail/i
will find all emails which originate from coppit.org (you must escape the "@" sign with a backslash),
and which contain the keyword "grepmail" anywhere in the message, in any capitalization.
-E is incompatible with -b, -h, and -e. -i, -M, -S, and -Y have not yet been implemented.
NOTE: The syntax of search expressions may change in the future. In particular, support for size, date,
and other constraints may be added. The syntax may also be simplified in order to make expression
formation easier to use (and perhaps at the expense of reduced functionality).
-e
Explicitly specify the search pattern. This is useful for specifying patterns that begin with "-",
which would otherwise be interpreted as a flag.
-f
Obtain patterns from FILE, one per line. The empty file contains zero patterns, and therefore
matches nothing.
-F
Force grepmail to process all files and streams as though they were mailboxes. (i.e. Skip checks for
non-mailbox ASCII files or binary files that don't look like they are compressed using known schemes.)
-h
Asserts that the pattern must match in the header of the email.
-H
Print the header but not body of matching emails.
-i
Make the search case-insensitive (by analogy to grep-i).
-j
Asserts that the email "Status:" header must contain the given flags. Order and case are not important,
so use -jAR or -jra to search for emails which have been read and answered.
-l
Output the names of files having an email matching the expression, (by analogy to grep-l).
-L
Follow symbolic links. (Implies -R)
-M
Causes grepmail to ignore non-text MIME attachments. This removes false positives resulting from
binaries encoded as ASCII attachments.
-m
Append "X-Mailfolder: <folder>" to all email headers, indicating which folder contained the matched
email.
-n
Prefix each line with line number information. If multiple files are specified, the filename will
precede the line number. NOTE: When used in conjunction with -m, the X-Mailfolder header has the same
line number as the next (blank) line.
-q
Quiet mode. Suppress the output of warning messages about non-mailbox files, directories, etc.
-r
Generate a report of the names of the files containing emails matching the expression, along with a
count of the number of matching emails.
-R
Causes grepmail to recurse any directories encountered.
-s
Return emails which match the size (in bytes) specified with this flag. Note that this size includes
the length of the header.
Size constraints must be of the form of:
- 12345: match size of exactly 12345
- <12345, <=12345, >12345, >=12345: match size less than, less than or equal,
greater than, or greater than or equal to 12345
- 10000-12345: match size between 10000 and 12345 inclusive
-S
Ignore signatures. The signature consists of everything after a line consisting of "-- ".
-u
Output only unique emails, by analogy to sort-u. Grepmail determines email uniqueness by the Message-
ID header.
-v
Invert the sense of the search, by analogy to grep-v. This results in the set of emails printed being
the complement of those that would be printed without the -v switch.
-V
Print the version and exit.
-w
Search for only those lines which contain the pattern as part of a word group. That is, the start of
the pattern must match the start of a word, and the end of the pattern must match the end of a word.
(Note that the start and end need not be for the same word.)
If you are familiar with Perl regular expressions, this flag simply puts a "\b" before and after the
search pattern.
-X
Specify a regular expression for the signature separator. By default this pattern is '^-- $'.
-Y
Specify a pattern which indicates specific headers to be searched. The search will automatically treat
headers which span multiple lines as one long line. This flag implies -h.
In the style of procmail, special strings in the pattern will be expanded as follows:
If the regular expression contains "^TO:" it will be substituted by
^((Original-)?(Resent-)?(To|Cc|Bcc)|(X-Envelope|Apparently(-Resent)?)-To):
which should match all headers with destination addresses.
If the regular expression contains "^FROM_DAEMON:" it will be substituted by
(^(Mailing-List:|Precedence:.*(junk|bulk|list)|To: Multiple recipients of |(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From )([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma?(st(e?r)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?|daemon|m(mdf|ajordomo)|n?uucp|LIST(SERV|proc)|NETSERV|o(wner|ps)|r(e(quest|sponse)|oot)|b(ounce|bs\.smtp)|echo|mirror|s(erv(ices?|er)|mtp(error)?|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR|utoanswer))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t ][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?
which should catch mails coming from most daemons.
If the regular expression contains "^FROM_MAILER:" it will be substituted by
(^(((Resent-)?(From|Sender)|X-Envelope-From):|>?From)([^>]*[^(.%@a-z0-9])?(Post(ma(st(er)?|n)|office)|(send)?Mail(er)?|daemon|mmdf|n?uucp|ops|r(esponse|oot)|(bbs\.)?smtp(error)?|s(erv(ices?|er)|ystem)|A(dmin(istrator)?|MMGR))(([^).!:a-z0-9][-_a-z0-9]*)?[%@>\t][^<)]*(\(.*\).*)?)?$([^>]|$))
(a stripped down version of "^FROM_DAEMON:"), which should catch mails coming from most mailer-
daemons.
So, to search for all emails to or from "Andy":
grepmail -Y '(^TO:|^From:)' Andy mailbox
--help
Print a help message summarizing the usage.
--
All arguments following -- are treated as mail folders.
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