I wanted a script to automatically watch for new emails, get the sender, subject and attachments from them, move the attachments to a directory and insert sender/subject info into a MySQL database.

I needed a solution for extracing mail files from big UNIX-style mailbox files, then parse them and extract attachments separately.

Here’s the script that does the job.

The script works by periodically checking /var/mail/chat for size change, then getting all mails from that mailbox file to a temp directory (/tmp/chatmailparser/). Then sender & subject get extracted, decoded with an external PHP script:

Attachments are saved to the temp folder also using this Perl script:

After moving them to their destination (modifying filenames if files already exist), the script puts chat message data into a MySQL database.

I’m using this init script for starting the chatmailparser script.