What to do with a message/partial MIME type?

Question

I used a copier/scanner to scan a document and email me the resulting image. It sent me several emails, each with a message/partial MIME attachment. mutt doesn't seem to understand these messages. What do I need to do to these to get my scanned image?

Answer 1

You need to use uudeview for this.

First, save all of the emails into their own mbox folder. Next, run uudeview on that folder. When prompted, either press 'd' (for 'd'ecode) or just hit enter. That will create a text file containing the all of the encoded data for the file. Run uudeview on that file to get the image you want.

For more information about the message/partial MIME type, check out its definition in RFC 2046.

Answer 2

Here is how I deal with such attachments in mutt:

1. I save the message/partial attachments in files named part_01, part_02 etc.

2. I then concatenate those files into a single file, e.g. in bash

   for file in part_??
    do
     cat $file >> full_message
    done
   

3. Lastly, I run uudeview on the full_message file.

   uudeview full_message
   

Notes:

• The only source from which I get these types of emails, are multi-page scans from "printer/fax/scanner/copier"-machines at my workplace (Ricoh Aficio MP C4501).
• The different "parts" are sent in different emails, with subjects pdf copy from <printername> part <x>/<y> where <printername> is the name of the printer and <x> is the part-number, and <y> is the total number of parts. Oddly enough, these emails do not arrive in a ordered sequence within my inbox.

Caveat:

• The "manual saving" could be quite cumbersome if you have many parts. So far, I have never recieved more than 5 parts. Nevertheless, I'm of course interested in a more elegant solution.