EMail Archiving - how to embed external images & co right on server?

I want to archive all the email received by my mailserver. So far, no problem. But what about those "beloved" mails with HTML body and external images? They get corrupted after some time, if the linked images are moved or removed. What do I get? Lots of "bad" and damaged Mails in the archive.

Is there a way to configure a Mailserver to embed those external imagery right on receiving into the email to avoid such ugly circumstances later?

Steadler

Posted 2013-09-07T07:14:33.430

Reputation: 11

Answers

you didn't specify which mailserver, but no, you generally can't. You can configure some mail servers to run each mail through separate program, and have such a program do the work (parsing MIME, getting all external URLs, and recombining the mail in new MIME message).

I'm not aware of such a filter existing, but it could be built using for example perl and MIMETools (if your MTA runs on GNU/Linux). So unless someone has written it (in which case please do tell others here!), you'll need to find some programmer to do the work.

Matija Nalis

Posted 2013-09-07T07:14:33.430

Reputation: 2 107

Well, I use Dovecot mostly. But as I thought too, this does not seem to make any difference. Although I find it somewhat strange, that nobody seems to have implemented such a system, as it sound more or less obviously useful. Perhaps I have to implement it myself. – Steadler – 2013-09-07T19:11:56.370

That is... if no one does know of an solution already in existance ;-) – Steadler – 2013-09-07T21:28:16.887

You can use MsgExtract to download the HTML linked images and embed them in the target format. I am not aware of a mail server that automatically embeds the images when receiving the email.

The target formats that you can use with MailExporter can be:

EML or MSG: The images will be stored as inline attachments (cid)
PDF: The downloaded images will be embeded in the body, and displayed by just opening the document. Optionally you can store the email metadata (headers, body, attachments) in the PDF so that it can be used as source for converting them back to EML or transferring them back to an email client.
HTML: An html page will be generated with the images

You can also transfer the email messages with the embedded images to an email client (IMAP, Thunderbird, Outlook).

You can find further information about MsgExtract exporting features here:

http://www.maildev.com/msgextract/

(Disclaimer, I am the author of MsgExtract)

jponce

Posted 2013-09-07T07:14:33.430

Reputation: 601

Hi there. Cut-and-paste answers are detected and flagged by the system and are in danger of being labelled as spam even if they are relevant. Please be more careful. – Nifle – 2013-10-03T18:43:29.150