Howto: receive mail and save attachment with fetchmail, procmail and metamail

At work I recently had to set up a solution that periodically checks a POP3 account on our M$ Exchange wannabe mailserver, and saves the attachments to some folder for further processing. As I didn't find a ready-to-go-solution for this on the web, just snippets here and there, and of course hundrets of other people asking the same, here it is.

You will need

• fetchmail
• procmail
• metamail (or uudeview, see first comment below)

In this example I'll use a POP3 account, the full mail will be backed up to ~/mail_backup, and attachments will be unpacked to ~/attachments. fetchmail also handles IMAP accounts just fine. Please refer to the fetchmail documentation.

Setting up fetchmail

First create a file $HOME/.fetchmailrc

poll my.pop3.server 
protocol pop3 
user 'myuser' 
password 'mypassword' 
mda '/usr/bin/procmail -d %T'

 

Setting up procmail and metamail

Then we configure procmail so it forwards the messages to metamail in $HOME/.procmailrc

:0
*^content-Type:
{
        # backup the complete mail first..
        # you can leave out this part if you don't want a backup of the complete mail
        :0c:
        $HOME/mail_backup

        # Now the actual unpacking part
        #
        # this is the place where the attachments will be unpacked to
        METAMAIL_TMPDIR=$HOME/attachments

        # forward to metamail
        :0fw
        | metamail -w -y -x
}

Regarding metamail, we tell it to ignore any mailcap file, so it doesn't use interpreters (-w), yanking the message and save the content raw (-y) and force it in non-interactive mode (-x).

That's it about it. We are ready for testing.

Test run

Now we simply fire up fetchmail, the rest should be magic.

fetchmail -kv