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mbox-cleaner

The program mbox-cleaner reads your mailbox files in mbox-format, compares the contents of the mails it finds in the mbox and then throws away mails, which have the same contents. This means, if you have multiple mails with same contents, after the mbox-cleaner has done it's work, you only have one copy of each mail inside your mailbox.

To clarify the term equality of mails:
Only the body of the mail is compared; equality of mail-body is interpreted as equality of mails. This is the reason, why one mail with the same contents (contents: mail-body) but coming from different mail-accounts to you, are interpreted as equasl: because the mailheader is ignored.

So, when you may get mails via several mailing lists and as a PM too, and all are saved in the same mbox-file, and you don't need the same mails more than once, use mbox-cleaner.
This program is written in OCaml. There was an article in the Brave GNU World (Linux-Magazin 04/2005) about this tool. The mentioned time the tool needed for the work was that of the bytecode program. The native code runs faster. :)

Mail: oliver _at_ first.in-berlin.de

last changed: 19th of July 2007