> No, I'd like to have the messages containing those annoying
> encoded parts to just be deleted in toto. It'd be nice if the import
> program could do it automagically.
It is probably not wise to automatically delete ALL MIME-encoded messages
since some mailers introduce plain text as MIME-encoded, and you might
want a friend on occasion to send you a picture, or a binary program
in the mail. I expect it would be fairly easy to have metamail or
similar program automatically skip the DISPLAY on the screen of a
particular type of MIME message: Just set the message type in mailcap
to some kind of null entry (e.g., type %nul > nul). However, the offensive
part of the message will still be there in, or instance, your inbox file.
If you want html or other parts of messages actually deleted from your
mail or news files there are ways to do this. For example, you can
use a stream editor like sed, or a split utility like cs (you can get
these at the Simtel archive for free) to strip lines out of the message
at the MIME, marked boundary lines, and then used the editfold program
(in the yarn utility package) to recompute the header for the message,
based on its new reduced size. I use this general method to process
listserv digests, so as to break them up into individual messages.
You can either use import to send messages to a desired folder, and
then use a dos batch file to postprocess the messages. Or you can
write a batch file to use a combination of, for instance, sed and
editfold, INSTEAD of import to process your messages.
The latter approach may be a problem when processing a large file or
incoming messages. Sed can process huge files, but I am not sure about
editfold.