Re: [Evolution] export collections of mails to txt file

[Max Malycha <max malycha de>]

Am Montag, den 02.11.2020, 17:22 +0100 schrieb Herr Oswald:
> > A manual way would look like:
> > a) view a message
> > b) select portion of the text you are interested in in the preview
> > panel
> > c) paste it to a text editor
> > d) save the file
> > e) close the editor
> > f) repeat from step a) as long as other messages to save as text
> > exist.
> >
> > There might be some tools to convert mbox to text, I mean command
> > line
> > tools, but I'm not aware of any (not using it). I'm sorry.
> >     Bye,
> >     Milan
>
> Thank you Milan, so I was not completely stupid, good to know.
> As I'm not processing rocket science secrets, hopefully the use of
> that
> online converter won't kill me...


Hi together,

there might be another way to export the complete mail to text (I have
tested the way on Ubuntu 20.04) - but it works only with mails in plain
text format (HTML does not work)!

 * install cups-pdf to get a local pdf-printer on your system (for all
   applications
 * install poppler-utils (there is a script called pdftotext included)
 * print the mail you want to get as a text-file via cups-pdf. On my
   system cups-pdf is configuered to put the pdf-file in
   /var/spool/cups-pdf/$LOGNAME
 * create a temporary directory for working, eg. /tmp/export-pdf
 * select all pdf-files you want as a textfile and copy/move them from
   cups-pdf directory to the temporary folder
 * cd into /tmp/export-pdf
 * run following commands: for i in *.pdf; do pdftotext $i; done
 * you will find a bunch of textfiles, named like your pdf-file, but
   with suffix .txt

That's it. 


Best regards

Max