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Storing complete emails including linked images

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Michael

In short, I need to store emails in their entirety; not just the headers, text, and HTML, but also any images linked to in the content.

I currently have a mail server set up with Postfix and Dovecot. I use it to receive newsletter emails which are often image rich. I've found an issue whereby after a while, many of the links to the images become invalid, rendering the content useless. I'd like to find a way to capture this content. Ideally I'd like a server-side solution, and I'd like to be able to browse the newsletter content from a mail client. Perhaps if the server were to download the images in emails as they're received and update the URLs in the emails to point to the downloaded image? Or perhaps base64 encode the images and have them inline?

Failing this, I could look for a client side solution; perhaps a Thunderbird plugin that downloads and caches the images, but then I can't share the newsletter library with others by simply giving them access to the email account. For this reason, and local storage requirements, client-side is not the preferred solution.

Potentially I could write something that would download and encapsulate each email as a PDF, but I do like the idea of being able to use an email client to browse the content.

Has anyone faced a similar challenge? Is anyone aware of any tools that might help support this, or am I in uncharted territory? Any thoughts or ideas most welcome.

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anx
A bash "one"-liner looping over all mails in relevant IMAP folders, skipping already processed mail, piping it to a MIME extractor and calling `chromium --headless --print-to-pdf` on each html part worked okay for me. Configuring my spam filter to just reject mail where the content is not properly sent along worked better ;)
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