maildrop and cleaning multipart MIME emails to plain text. (T-Moble tmomail.net service)

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maildrop and cleaning multipart MIME emails to plain text. (T-Moble tmomail.net service)

by Stroller :: Rate this Message:

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Hi there,

A friend has started sending text messages from her phone to my email
address. They arrive with a from: address of 1212121212@...
(where 1212121212 is her cell number) and I can reply to them and
that's all great, but they come annoyingly encumbered with a bunch of
T-Mobile .gif images and such clutter. The plain text of these
messages are only a few words, yet the email is 25kb in size because
of all these images!

If I look at the message source it shows rubbish like this:

------=_Part_1260035_17792989.1257702378190
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Location: 01smil
Content-ID: <0000>
Content-Disposition: inline

<html>
<head>
=09=09<title>T-Mobile</title>=20
=09=09
=09=09<style type=3D"text/css">

=09=09</style>
=09</head>
=09<body marginwidth=3D"0" marginheight=3D"0" leftmargin=3D"0"
topmargin=3D=
"0" bgcolor=3D"#ffffff">
=09=09<table border=3D"0" width=3D"600" cellspacing=3D"0"
cellpadding=3D"0"=

All this to say, pretty much, "how are you? lol"! (and the above is
severely truncated - I only show it to show what a mess this is!)

What I find really aggravating about this is that if I click reply
then my mail reader will quote an HTML table (which T-Mobile used to
arrange their pretty graphics) and yet won't actually attach the
original graphics themselves, so I see this big ugly of quoted:

<dottedline350.gif>
<tmobilespace.gif>
<tmobilelogo.gif>
<tmobilespace.gif>

The great thing about these messages are that they appear to contain a
plain text section:

------=_Part_1233335_2792974.3457702378123
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; name=Text01.txt
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Location: Text01.txt
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-ID: <555>

how are you? lol
------=_Part_1233335_2792974.3457702378123

So my big question is, can anyone suggest any tools for reformatting
the message as plain text only, and dumping all the crap?

I would love it if there's a tool that will just do the whole job for
me, but I'm prepared to hack together my own Bash script if necessary.

I really want to leave the headers intact, so that I can get maildrop
to perform the action, and it'll come into my mailbox still looking
like an ordinary email, but a plain text one, and with the subject and
reply-to address unchanged.

I really want to get maildrop to *still* send me the original message
with all the crap in it, but *also* this plain text copy - there are
indicators that the service is MMS based, so it's possible that
attachments could be sent, and I don't want to just dump a photo,
should one be sent.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I feel kinda ridiculous having to write such a long email - and
perhaps spend a bunch more time writing scripts - to handle such a
stupid thing. I guess the ridiculous thing is the cell company adding
all this junk to a simple text message. But I can really imagine this
formatting getting my goat enormously over time, and I don't want to
get annoyed at my friend over such a trivial thing.

Stroller.

Re: maildrop and cleaning multipart MIME emails to plain text. (T-Moble tmomail.net service)

by Alan McKinnon-2 :: Rate this Message:

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On Monday 09 November 2009 01:04:55 Stroller wrote:
> I feel kinda ridiculous having to write such a long email - and
> perhaps spend a bunch more time writing scripts - to handle such a
> stupid thing. I guess the ridiculous thing is the cell company adding
> all this junk to a simple text message. But I can really imagine this
> formatting getting my goat enormously over time, and I don't want to
> get annoyed at my friend over such a trivial thing.

To my mind, the solution seems obvious:

Change your friend's behaviour, because you are unlikely to change T-Mobile.

Just tell her that her messages are an unreadable mess that no sane person on
the planet can work with, and she should please use a different means of
communicating with you. Real friends will understand.

--
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com