[Users] Saving Messages Outside of Claws Mail

[Milan Obuch]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2021 18:37:51 +0600, Dustin Miller <dustbiz at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm looking for an efficient way to save email messages outside of
> Claws Mail that will be readable by a text editor or web browser
> without a lot of extra noise (i.e. headers, HTML tags, etc.).
>

Mail headers are easy, just couple of lines at athe message file begin.
For HTML tags, some filter is necessary to throw them away and rewrite
some tokens.

> Thus far, the best solution I have found is to view the message part
> that has the basic header info (From, To, Subject, Date, etc.) and the
> message body, and then select its contents, copy, and paste into a new
> text file I've created for it. This works, but isn't very efficient.
>

If you have some manual method how to do what you need, most probably
there is a way to automate that.

> I thought maybe the 'Mail Archiver' plugin would do what I want, but
> it's not currently loadable, so I'm guessing I was missing one or more
> dependencies during the build. Does anyone know if this plugin has a
> chance of doing something like I want it to? If so, do you know
> offhand what dependencies it has?
>

Could you look at ./configure output? You should see there what is
missing for some plugin to be built.

> Is there another solution anyone knows of for this that you think
> would be better/best?
>

Scripting. Either use some action with script attached to it or use
scripting plugin (in current Claws sources, Python plugin is included,
or <shameless advertisement>my Lua plugin is under active development
and works well (for my needs)</shameless advertisement>.

> The basic idea of what I'm aiming for is to 'convert' a lot of emails
> from a status of being Claws Mail messages to a status of being
> 'regular' files on my computer that can be opened for easy reference
> without needing an email client to open them.
> 
> (As an example, I used a Thunderbird plugin that did batch exporting
> to various formats and automatically saved them with a filename that
> included the date at the beginning so that the files would be sortable
> chronologically. This worked well for me, since for many emails I
> could just select a bunch of them, choose the file format, and point
> the tool to the folder I wanted them in, and then move on to the next
> batch.)
>

For actions, look in menu Configuration->Actions. Some important items
are under 'Infomation' button. For scripting plugin, look at official
web site, https://www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=python for Python
plugin, or google for some examples. If you'd like to try experimental
Lua scripting plugin (I am biased, I consider this one the best...
*grin*), drop me a line - maybe privately if you choose so.

Regards,
Milan