From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Sat Feb 7 08:44:37 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info) Date: Sat Feb 7 08:44:40 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files Message-ID: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Every once in a long while, I have to deal with a .msg file. .msg is an MS Outlook thing. It is a container for email or related things. I'm on Fedora Linux and it doesn't seem to have anything to unpack .msg files. - LibreOffice has a go at it but isn't successful - debian and Ubuntu have a tool "msgconv". This didn't trivially build on Fedora so I gave up. I did use msgconv on Ubuntu. It worked but was a bit awkward. Note: my Alpine uses mbox format folders. - copy .msg file to Ubuntu machine - "msgconvert -mbox mbox *.msg" - copy "mbox" to machine where I run Alpine - alpine -f ../mbox - you are now looking at the contents of the .msg; do what you want with it. One could use Outlook on an MS Windows machine but I don't have a license for Outlook. Besides, I fear the learning curve (I've never lived on Windows). Does it make sense for Alpine to be able to open .msg attachments? (Kind of like the way Alpine can open RFC 822 attachments -- nice, BTW.) Does anyone else have a good solution for this problem? From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Sat Feb 7 09:15:03 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Chime Hart via Alpine-info) Date: Sat Feb 7 09:15:09 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Message-ID: I wouldn't know if "unp" would unpack an archive such as dot msg? I suppose you could install-and-experiment. I like unp as it handles wild-cards, so I can extract multiple dot zip or dot rar files. Hope that will help Chime From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Sat Feb 7 12:22:39 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info) Date: Sat Feb 7 12:22:51 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Message-ID: <69po4037-4o6s-p44-88o1-q1rp26124r4@ynzoengr.vans.vg> On Sat, 7 Feb 2026, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info wrote: > .msg is an MS Outlook thing. It is a container for email or related > things. No idea about msg. I often receive instead MIME digests containing many e-mail (from maling lists, including this one). In such case I have a way to unpack them as message in a temporary folder all within pine. From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Sat Feb 7 17:26:08 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info) Date: Sat Feb 7 17:26:32 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Message-ID: <3403e7fa-219a-1f00-e658-b7e9aaa91d7d@yandex.com> On Sat, 7 Feb 2026, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info wrote: > Every once in a long while, I have to deal with a .msg file. > > .msg is an MS Outlook thing. It is a container for email or related > things. May I ask how you got that message? I can get .msg messages from the web interface of Outlook. I am working on reading/downloading messages from the web interface that can be saved in Alpine. Stay tuned! -- Eduardo From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Mon Feb 9 20:44:11 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Hisashi T Fujinaka via Alpine-info) Date: Mon Feb 9 20:44:16 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <3403e7fa-219a-1f00-e658-b7e9aaa91d7d@yandex.com> References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> <3403e7fa-219a-1f00-e658-b7e9aaa91d7d@yandex.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Feb 2026, Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info wrote: > On Sat, 7 Feb 2026, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info wrote: > >> Every once in a long while, I have to deal with a .msg file. >> >> .msg is an MS Outlook thing. It is a container for email or related >> things. > > May I ask how you got that message? I can get .msg messages from the web > interface of Outlook. I am working on reading/downloading messages from the > web interface that can be saved in Alpine. > > Stay tuned! I used to use demime or something. Nowadays there's so much html nonsense that I'm using other clients when I see things like that. I try to stick to Alpine but yeesh. Good luck Eduardo! -- Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd@twofifty.com BSEE + BSChem + BAEnglish + MSCS + $2.50 = coffee From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Mon Feb 9 20:54:21 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info) Date: Mon Feb 9 20:54:48 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> <3403e7fa-219a-1f00-e658-b7e9aaa91d7d@yandex.com> Message-ID: <2693934e-d2b5-6043-36af-07579984f33f@yandex.com> On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote: > I used to use demime or something. Nowadays there's so much html > nonsense that I'm using other clients when I see things like that. I try > to stick to Alpine but yeesh. Good luck Eduardo! When I receive an HTML message that I am interested in reading, I pass it to a web browser for display. In order to do that, I normally do as follows: * While reading the message, I press "V", * then I move to the TEXT/HTML attachment, and * I press "X" to open the attachment as an eXternal command. My url-viewers command is to "$HOME/fire _URL_" (including the quotes), and $HOME/fire is a script that eats the stderr output #!/bin/bash /usr/bin/firefox "$1" &>/dev/null & (as contributed by an Alpine user) With that, I can read any html message I want, which for me is the exception, not the rule. -- Eduardo From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Tue Feb 10 12:29:03 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info) Date: Tue Feb 10 12:29:16 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <2693934e-d2b5-6043-36af-07579984f33f@yandex.com> References: <2693934e-d2b5-6043-36af-07579984f33f@yandex.com> Message-ID: <5323073-028-5qr0-83sn-q5sn15q79n7p@ynzoengr.vans.vg> On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info wrote: > On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote: > >> I used to use demime or something. Nowadays there's so much html >> nonsense > With that, I can read any html message I want, which for me is the > exception, not the rule. I share your discomfort with html mail, specially for the case where a message contains two copies, a plain text one and an html "duplicate", and secondarlly for those newsletters which send a single html part without linefeeds. So I have a set of procmail rules - one default rule using an external shell script will strip the the html part so that in my inbox I see only the plain text (and I archive only such version). The script also strips top posting stuff. For safety the original untouched message is saved to a temporary folder (cycles weekly), so I can get at it if something goes wrong - a few rules BEFORE that will avoid such processing for a few addresses which send legitimate html mail (usually newsletters with graphics, eoither as a single well formatted html part, or a linefeed-less obe > When I receive an HTML message that I am interested in reading, I pass it > to a web browser for display. In order to do that (usually for the newsletters above, I normally do as follows. - in the message do V (for view attachments) - then S to save the html as a file in s specific directory (usually temp/AAAB/temp.html, with Overwrite) - then in my browser I go to such directory and view it (note that in my case the machine where I sit, my home PC, is not the machine where mail arrives (a work PC). I usually run alpine in an ssh terminal from home to work. So temp/AAAB is on the work machine (which has an apache server), while the browser is on the home machine. But it could work even if all would be on a single PC, and even if it has no apache server (I actually I have one at home though local), using file"// insetad of hhtp:// on the browser. From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Wed Feb 11 05:32:51 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (Joshua Miller via Alpine-info) Date: Wed Feb 11 05:33:07 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Message-ID: Hello! I ran into this ages ago. FYI for those asking how you got a .msg file, I got mine via outlook users that attached another email to their email and sent it to me. I've used msgconvert.pl to handle them. You noted that Debian and Ubuntu have "msgconv"; Maybe that was a typo, or you got it from the msgconvert site URL? "msgconv" handles character set conversions (Ex. mapping Greek characters to equivalents in other character sets). I think you are referring to the same utility I used, and it's the same one you linked to at https://www.matijs.net/software/msgconv/ That, msgconvert, is a perl script. It uses the perl module "Email::Outlook::Message" to do the heavy lifting, and "Email::LocalDelivery" to write output to an mbox compatible file. You should be able to install that cleanly just about anywhere. You noted it didn't trivially build on Fedora - what problems did you have? I took a quick peek at fedora package search for perl-email-outlook-message but I don't see it in their default repositories. Maybe you can find that prepackaged elsewhere in an rpm? The CPAN based install noted on the msgconvert site should also work. Once that prerequisite is installed (and the couple other trivial ones), the script should run fine. Running it as you have is more-or-less how I made use of it. More precisely, I would: * From alpine, save the .msg file to a temp directory. * From another terminal, run msgconvert.pl to add that message to an existing mbox I dedicated to this use. Ex: msgconvert.pl --mbox ~/mail/msgconv_dumps /path/to/temp/file.msg * Back in alpine, I had configured mailboxes to look at that mbox file, so I can just switch to that folder. The newly added messages will be marked as new and unread. For me, that was far better than firing up Outlook. Sadly, my company moved to Office 365 (or whatever it's called now) and has restricted what email clients may authenticate, so I just use web based outlook and avoid email when possible, lol. Hope that helps! -- Josh I. On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 11:44?AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info < alpine-info@u.washington.edu> wrote: > Every once in a long while, I have to deal with a .msg file. > > .msg is an MS Outlook thing. It is a container for email or related > things. > < > https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/resources/document-files/text-files/msg.html > > > > I'm on Fedora Linux and it doesn't seem to have anything to unpack > .msg files. > > - LibreOffice has a go at it but isn't successful > > - debian and Ubuntu have a tool "msgconv". > > > This didn't trivially build on Fedora so I gave up. > > I did use msgconv on Ubuntu. It worked but was a bit awkward. > Note: my Alpine uses mbox format folders. > > - copy .msg file to Ubuntu machine > > - "msgconvert -mbox mbox *.msg" > > - copy "mbox" to machine where I run Alpine > > - alpine -f ../mbox > > - you are now looking at the contents of the .msg; do what you want with > it. > > One could use Outlook on an MS Windows machine but I don't have a license > for Outlook. Besides, I fear the learning curve (I've never lived on > Windows). > > Does it make sense for Alpine to be able to open .msg attachments? > (Kind of like the way Alpine can open RFC 822 attachments -- nice, BTW.) > > Does anyone else have a good solution for this problem? > _______________________________________________ > Alpine-info mailing list > Alpine-info@u.washington.edu > http://mailman23.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/alpine-info > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Wed Feb 11 05:59:15 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info) Date: Wed Feb 11 05:59:18 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] viewing .html [was: Re:ingesting .msg files] In-Reply-To: <5323073-028-5qr0-83sn-q5sn15q79n7p@ynzoengr.vans.vg> References: <2693934e-d2b5-6043-36af-07579984f33f@yandex.com> <5323073-028-5qr0-83sn-q5sn15q79n7p@ynzoengr.vans.vg> Message-ID: > From: Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info > On Mon, 9 Feb 2026, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote: >> When I receive an HTML message that I am interested in reading, I pass it >> to a web browser for display. I have a similar problem: "temporarily" my mail server is remote. I SSH into the server to run alpine. > In order to do that (usually for the newsletters above, I normally do as > follows. > > - in the message do V (for view attachments) My muscle memory uses the right arrow key for this. V is probably better: easier to touch type and has fewer meanings in the wrong context. > - then S to save the html as a file in s specific directory > (usually temp/AAAB/temp.html, with Overwrite) I use "0" as a tempfile name, or 1 if that is busy, etc. This convention yields short names that are easy to distinguish from the names of important files. In this case I use 0.html in my home directory. I have GNOME Files browser running locally, with the remote directory available via SFTP. Then I just double-click on the 0.html in Files and the local FireFox takes it from there. The same method works for other odd attachments like JPEGs and MS Office files. Still annoying. When Alpine was running locally, it could fire up firefox itself. From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Wed Feb 11 06:16:40 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info) Date: Wed Feb 11 06:16:43 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] changing Alpine's window's title/header (under Gnome Terminal) In-Reply-To: <0a9eff40-9fe7-5fee-7513-1b2537b48912@mimosa.com> References: <0a9eff40-9fe7-5fee-7513-1b2537b48912@mimosa.com> Message-ID: > From: D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info > Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2025 09:50:43 -0400 (EDT) > When I run Alpine in a Gnome terminal, it puts "alpine" in the window's > header. This is something alpine is actively doing since the default > terminal header (maintained by BASH) has user@host:directory. I know suspect that this is done by the system-wide bash .profile. But it takes too much spelunking to figure that out. It runs all these and more" $ ls -l /etc/profile.d/*.sh /etc/profile.d/sh.local lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 57 Jan 4 19:00 /etc/profile.d/70-systemd-shell-extra.sh -> ../../usr/lib/systemd/profile.d/70-systemd-shell-extra.sh lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 57 Jan 4 19:00 /etc/profile.d/80-systemd-osc-context.sh -> ../../usr/lib/systemd/profile.d/80-systemd-osc-context.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 6037 Jul 24 2025 /etc/profile.d/bash-color-prompt.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 747 Jul 22 2025 /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 205 Jul 23 2025 /etc/profile.d/colorgrep.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1431 Jan 15 19:00 /etc/profile.d/colorls.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 205 Nov 22 19:00 /etc/profile.d/colorxzgrep.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 220 Jul 23 2025 /etc/profile.d/colorzgrep.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 923 Oct 27 20:00 /etc/profile.d/debuginfod.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 873 Jan 20 19:00 /etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 757 Aug 28 2019 /etc/profile.d/gawk.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 241 Mar 3 2025 /etc/profile.d/gmpopenh264.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 22 Jan 27 19:00 /etc/profile.d/gnupg2.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3187 Jul 24 2025 /etc/profile.d/lang.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 253 Jul 23 2025 /etc/profile.d/less.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 120 Jul 23 2025 /etc/profile.d/nano-default-editor.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1351 Jan 22 19:00 /etc/profile.d/PackageKit.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 81 Jul 24 2025 /etc/profile.d/sh.local -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3675 Sep 16 20:00 /etc/profile.d/toolbox.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 5062 Jan 21 19:00 /etc/profile.d/vte.sh -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 465 Jul 24 2025 /etc/profile.d/which2.sh > It turns out that I sometimes run alpine on different hosts at the > same time. The window header doesn't allow me to tell which alpine is in > which window. > > Is there a way to customize what Alpine sets the window header to? > I searched for "alpine" in the config screen and none of the matches > seemed to be for window headers. I figured out a stupid trick to do this: ln -s /usr/bin/alpine bin/distinct-name-for-alpine >From then on, I can fire up alpine with the command "distinct-name-for-alpine" and get that in the terminal window header. From alpine-info at u.washington.edu Wed Feb 11 06:52:04 2026 From: alpine-info at u.washington.edu (D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info) Date: Wed Feb 11 06:52:09 2026 Subject: [Alpine-info] ingesting .msg files In-Reply-To: References: <978db2f1-9fa5-78a1-1928-7f00bb4bac4c@mimosa.com> Message-ID: > From: Joshua Miller Thanks for you useful message! > You noted that Debian and Ubuntu have "msgconv"; Maybe that was a typo, or > you got it from the msgconvert site URL? "msgconv" handles character set > conversions (Ex. mapping Greek characters to equivalents in other character > sets). I think you are referring to the same utility I used, and it's the > same one you linked to at https://www.matijs.net/software/msgconv/ Right you are! > You noted it didn't trivially build on Fedora - what problems did you have? I don't remember. I tend to get .msg files once a year and this was a year ago. My one Ubuntu installation is on a failing notebook so I was revisiting. I found that the debian / ubuntu package can be installed via apt on a ChomeOS Linux subsystem "Crostini". I strongly prefer software from my distro's repos. That makes updates and upgrades a lot smoother. I mostly avoid using CPAN and PyPI directly; this would be a mistake if I programmed in perl or python (Rust has the same problem).