blaze aggregates many tools to manipulate emails. The goal is to iterate
between high-level usages of emails and libraries such as mrmime,
dkim or spf. It's an experimental repository!
As we said, blaze has many tools which want to be used into an UNIX context.
It permits to analyze, extract or stamp emails. This is an example of how to
use blaze:
$ git clone https://github.com/dinosaure/blaze
$ cd blaze
$ opam pin add -y .
# Assume that ~/maildir/ is a Maildir directory which contains your emails
$ export MSG=$(blaze mdir new -D ~/maildir/ | tail -n1)
# We have the Maildir of the last message
$ blaze mdir get -D ~/maildir/ --new $MSG > new.eml
# We can verify DKIM signature
$ blaze dkim verify new.eml
[OK]: blaze.org
# Or SPF results
$ blaze spf analyze new.eml
romain@blaze.org from 192.168.0.0: pass (expected: pass)
# And extract some informations from it
$ blaze addr --without-name new.eml
romain@blaze.orgblaze wants to be simple to send an email. First, you need to craft
one with some meta-information. Then, you can attach a document to your
email and then, pass it to blaze send with your account credentials. You
may be need another tool, conan, to be able to recognize the MIME
type of the attachment.
$ blaze make <<EOF \
| blaze make wrap --mixed
| blaze make put --type $(conan.file --mime image.png) \
--encoding base64 image.png
| blaze send --sender foo@bar - smtp.bar
> Hello World!
> EOFAs you can see, you can craft and send your email along the UNIX pipe.
blaze provides a little server which is able to receive emails. You can
receive one or some depending on arguments given to blaze srv. By default, it
wants to listen on *:25. It's an implementation of a simple SMTP server and
it waiting an email to save it then into your file-system:
$ sudo blaze srv -o new.eml &
[1] PID
$ blaze make <<EOF \
| blaze send --sender foo@bar -r admin@localhost
> Hello World!
> EOF
$ cat new.eml
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2022 16:49:55 +0100
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Hello World!
To receive multiple emails, you can launch blaze srv like this:
$ sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:25,fork TCP:localhost:4242 &
$ mkdir mailbox
$ blaze srv -o mailbox/ --format "blaze-%s.eml" localhost:4242 &
$ blaze make <<EOF | blaze send --sender din@osau.re -r foo@bar - localhost:25
> Hello World!
> EOFSMTP is a bi-diretional protocol where a SMTP server can be a client for another SMTP server. When you want to send an email, you have 2 possibilities:
- send an email to a recipient directly under my identity concretized via my computer (my hostname, etc.)
- send an email to a recipient through a certain identity provided by
a SMTP server (like
gmail.com)
For the first case, you want to use blaze send which sends an email directly
to the given SMTP server (on *:25) or the SMTP server of the first recipient.
For instance, this command send an email to foo:25:
$ blaze send --sender romain@blaze.org -r bar@fooHowever, you probably want some security mechanisms such as DKIM or SPF offered
by a certain service like gmail.com. In that case, you want to submit
an email to this service which will re-send your email under its
authority with its security mechanisms:
$ blaze submit --sender romain@blaze.org --password ****** -r bar@fooThe second case ensure that the communication between you and the SMTP service
is encrypted (via STARTTLS or over TLS). Otherwise, it does not try to
send an email. Then, the submission server is not foo:25 like before but
blaze.org:{465,587}. Usually, this service requires a password.
In both case, bar@foo will receive an email but:
- in the first case, it will receive the email as is
- in the second case, your serviteur (
blaze.org) probably put some metadata to letbar@footo verify the given email
blaze also lets you download emails and store them in a folder. There are additional tools for storing these emails in ‘maildir’, ‘mbox’ or our special ‘pack’ format.
You can currently download emails from your GMail account for the last 30 days in this way:
$ mkdir mailbox
$ blaze fetch pop3://pop.gmail.com:995 --username recent:<username>@gmail.com \
--password ****** -f "mailbox/%s.eml" > emails.txtYou can then generate an archive of these emails in our PACK format:
$ blaze pack make -o pack.pack emails.txt
$ blaze pack index pack.packAs mentioned above, blaze prefers to store emails in a special format, the PACK format. It is possible to switch from a format such as mbox to the PACK format if you wish, so that you use less disk space to store your emails.
$ blaze mbox archive.mbox -o pack.pack
$ blaze pack index pack.packThis project received funding through NGI Zero Core, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.