mailinspect reads the single mbox folder named FILE and sorts it in order of similarity to
the
category , which must have been
created by
dbacl(1) . It can be used as a command line tool or interactively, when given the
-I switch.
When used as a command line tool,
mailinspect prints the sorted list of emails on STDOUT. Each line consists of a
seek position for the given email within FILE, followed by the score and a description
string in one of several styles chosen via the
-p option.
When supplying a
command string in conjunction with the
-s option,
mailinspect spawns a shell and executes
command for every email in FILE (possibly selected via the
-g " or" -G options), in the sorted order. This is similar to the
formail(1) functionality, except the latter doesn't order the emails.
In interactive mode, all the command line functionality is available via
keypresses. The sorted list of emails is displayed in a scrollable format,
and can be viewed, searched, tagged, resorted and sent to shell commands. Predefined
shell commands can be associated with function keys. See the usage section below.
The sorting heuristics are currently (and may always be) experimental,
so there is no guarantee that the orderings are particularly well suited
for anything.
EXIT STATUS
mailinspect
returns 1 on success, 0 if some error occurred.
OPTIONS
-c
Use
category to compute the scores and sort the emails, which
should be the file name of a
dbacl(1) category.
-g
Only emails matching the regular expression
regex are sorted. All other emails are ignored. When several
-g and
-G options are present on the command line,
earlier regular expressions are overridden
by later ones where applicable.
-i
Force internationalized mode.
-j
Force regular expression searches to be case sensitive.
-o
Determines the scoring formula to be used. The parameter
scoring must be an integer greater than or equal to zero. By default,
scoring equals zero.
-p
Prints the email index in the given style. The parameter
style must be an integer greater than or equal to zero. By default,
style equals zero.
-s
For each email in the list, execute the shell
command , with the email body on STDIN. Emails are processed in sorted order.
-z
Reverse sort order. Normally, emails are sorted in order of closest
to furthest relative to
category , but in this case, the opposite is true.
-I
Interactive mode. Instead of printing the sorted list of emails
on STDOUT, emails are displayed and can be scrolled, viewed,
searched and piped interactively at the terminal.
-G
Only emails
not matching the regular expression
regex are sorted. Opposite of
-g switch.
-V
Print the program version number and exit.
USAGE
mailinspect needs to read a prelearned
category before it can sort the emails in FILE. See
dbacl(1) .
Suppose you have two mail folders named
good.mbox and
bad.mbox respectively. You can create appropriate categories by typing the commands
% dbacl -l good good.mbox -T email
% dbacl -l bad bad.mbox -T email
Next, you can type the following command to view interactively the
bad.mbox file with the emails whose score is closest to the category
good listed first:
% mailinspect -I -c good bad.mbox
Alternatively, you might be interested only in the five emails in the folder
bad.mbox whose score marks them as the furthest away from the category
bad , completely independently from any other category such as
good (ie you want outliers in the scoring sense).
% mailinspect -z -c bad bad.mbox | head -5
In interactive mode, the following keys are defined:
o
toggles another scoring formula.
p
toggles another display style.
q
exits
mailinspect .
s
sends the currently highlighted email to a shell command.
S
sends all currently tagged emails to a shell command, in sorted order.
Every email executes the shell command independently.
t
tags the currently highlighted email.
T
tags all listed emails.
v
sends the currently highlighted email to $PAGER for viewing. If the environment
variable PAGER is not defined, sends the email to
less(1) .
u
untags the highlighted email.
U
untags all listed emails.
z
reverses the sort order of displayed emails.
/
searches for a regular expression (see
regex(7) ) anywhere within the contents of all listed emails. Hides all emails
which don't match.
?
like /, but hides all emails which match, keeping all those which don't match.
As a convenience, the function keys F1-F10 can each be associated
with a shell command string. In this
case, typing a function key has the same effect as the S key, but the command is
already typed and ready to be edited/accepted.
The function key associations are read from the configuration file .mailinspectrc
if it exits.
FILES
$HOME/.mailinspectrc
mailinspect reads the file .mailinspectrc in the $HOME directory, if it exists.
This is a plain text file which contains entries of the form
# this is a comment
F2 cat >> interesting.mbox
F5 mail zarniwoop@megadodo.com
ENVIRONMENT
DBACL_PATH
When this variable is set, its value is prepended to every
category filename which doesn't start with a '/'.
SOURCE
The source code for the latest version of this program is available at the
following locations:
