The Grumpy Editor reviews Claws Mail [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor reviews Claws Mail

Posted May 29, 2008 7:13 UTC (Thu) by seanodes (guest, #29104)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor reviews Claws Mail

Just one thing, about Actions: you can indeed pipe a complete mail to an arbitrary command;
using either:

|mycommand

(which sends message body or selection to mycommand's stdin) or

mycommand < %f

to send the full raw file.

For example:
ROT-13 selection or body
|tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M|
(the trailing | sends the result back to the message view)

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Piping to commands

Posted May 29, 2008 12:24 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I think I expressed my self badly, sorry. What I meant is that you cannot pipe mail to an arbitrary command specified at the time of the action. You can preconfigure as many actions as you like, but, when it comes to be time to run a command on a message, you have to pick one out of those you've set up ahead of time.

Piping to commands

Posted May 29, 2008 16:22 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I think you could construct something like that by creating an action that 
pipes into a shell script that calls kdialog (or a similar tool).  Maybe 
something like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec `kdialog --inputbox "Enter command to pipe into" ""`

Piping to commands

Posted May 29, 2008 16:26 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Actually, Claws Mail has a way to accept a string which then gets piped into the canned command. So one could write a script which reads the string and interprets it as a command to be run with the file containing the email as input. Should work, I just need to mess with it some. But it should be easier...

Piping to commands

Posted May 30, 2008 10:37 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Since claws sits on top of an MH mail store, can you not just have a command that reads the
message directly from the filesystem? It's a bit of a hack, I know, but it should at least
work.

(Happy MH user for nearly 20 years now -- I've been thinking about Claws, but so far, I
haven't felt the need to make the switch)

The Grumpy Editor reviews Claws Mail

Posted May 29, 2008 16:09 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

Kmail for a long time has had the ability to pipe messages into external programs. In fact the
"integrated spam filtering" that kmail possesses relies entirely on passing messages to
external spam filtering commands.