splitmail(1)

splitmail1

Split a large mail message into mime-compliant partial messages

Usage

splitmail [-d] [-v] [-s splitsize] [-p prefix] [-i id-suffix] [file-name]

Overview

The splitmail program will take an email message and break it up into smaller pieces using the "message/partial" type defined by MIME(1), the proposed Internet standard for multimedia mail formats.

By default it will take the message either from standard input or the named file, and will produce a set of partial message files with names like "/tmp/split.1" for the first part, and so on. The prefix "/tmp/split." can be overridden using the "-p" option.

If the -d option is specified, the mail will actually be delivered. If -v is specified, the verbose flag will be passed to sendmail(8).

The -i option can be used to make splitmail generate the pieces with similar (but not identical) message-id fields, in a format which allows them to be easily correlated with one another and which end with the suffix provided on the command line after -i.

The default chunk size for splitting messages is 250000 at most sites, though this is also a compile-time option. This can be overridden with the -s switch, or with the environment variable SPLITSIZE.

Messages smaller than the chunk size will not be turned into partial messages, but will be written to a single file or delivered as a single message.

Environment

SPLITSIZE overrides the default chunk size. Setting SPLITSIZE to, say, 4000000 will effectively ensure that your messages are unlikely ever to be split, but it may cause them to be rejected by some mail transport software.

Releases

10 releases since Debian 1.1 (Buzz); the text changed 2 times.

  1. 1.1–3.0
  2. 3.1
  3. 4.0–5.0

Bugs

If the size of the input is just on the fencepost, and if it is coming from a file rather than standard input, splitmail will sometimes estimate the number of parts wrong and will have to write out an extra part. This is harmless but annoying. It is especially annoying if the estimate was 2 but the real number was 1.

Author

Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Bellcore

From metamail 2.7-54 in Debian 5.0 (Lenny). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.