UUDeview – extract images from MIME mail

A Tech article with View Comments posted 1 July 2009.
Tags: email

I ran across an unusual problem tonight. I got a bunch of pictures of our recent visit to Kansas City from my sister-in-law, and I wanted to download those images. Alas, Gmail let me down – while I could right-click and save each of the 54 images, there was no “Download All Attachments” link at the bottom of the message. Frustrated, I fired up Evolution and looked to see if it could tackle the task – nope. What’s a hacker to do?

Well, a little Googling brought me to UUDeview, a program which hasn’t received any updates since 2004, but nonetheless is highly useful and available in your friendly neighborhood Ubuntu repository. Getting the images out was simple.

1. sudo aptitude install uudeview
2. Download the “original source” of the email to a file, let’s say /home/ted/Desktop/email.eml
3. uudeview /home/ted/Desktop/email.eml
4. Press p to set the folder where you want the images to go.
5. Press a to extract all the images.

And for those of you Windows or Mac users, it looks like there are versions available for those operating systems too. I’d say that this is the best little utility I’d never heard of.