email2pdf

email2pdf is a Python script to convert emails to PDF from the command-line. email2pdf acts in place of a mail delivery agent - it won't retrieve emails for you, but it will take them from standard input as an MDA will and 'deliver' them to PDF files. Type email2pdf --help for more information on usage and options available.

Dependencies

• wkhtmltopdf - if on Ubuntu, install the .deb from http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ rather than using apt-get to minimise the dependencies you need to install (in particular, to avoid needing a package manager).

• getmail - getmail is not strictly a dependency, but when it is combined with email2pdf, it can be used to retrieve new emails from a remote IMAP server and automatically convert them to PDFs locally. The getmailrc.sample file in the repository can be used as a starting point for your own getmailrc to do this. Note that the sample will need editing, of course - see the getmail documentation for more information on that. Also, it is configured by default to delete remote emails from the server once they are converted - be careful with that. You might want to consider setting up your crontab something like this:

  @hourly getmail --verbose | logger
  

  This will ensure that getmail is invoked hourly to fetch email, and log its output to syslog.

• Others - there are some other Python library dependencies. The Debian packaging (see below) will set the dependencies on the package appropriately. For OS X, please install dependencies as shown in the 'Developing & Hacking' section below.

Building & Packaging

All the supplied build and packaging is based on a Makefile. You'll need make if you don't have it (sudo apt-get install make on Ubuntu/Debian, brew install make on OS X).

Debian/Ubuntu

Some basic Debian packaging is included. Simply run make builddeb to build a Debian package.

Docker

There is some experimental packaging for Docker also. You can run the following make targets:

• builddocker - build a Docker image, which can be used for testing, development, etc.

• builddocker_nocache - build a Docker image without Docker caching.

• rundocker_interactive - build and start a Docker image, at the bash prompt.

• rundocker_testing - build and start the Docker image, run the entire unit testing and style testing suites, and exit.

• rundocker_getdebs - build and start the Docker image, and copy out various .debs, including the .deb for email2pdf itself, and various dependencies that are harder to come by or need to be built manually.

Developing & Hacking

Design & Coding Principles

• Follow PEP-8.

• Try to keep email2pdf as "safe" as possible by default. Without supplying any potentially harmful command-line options, email2pdf will not ignore parts of the email it shouldn't, and will fail in the standard UNIX way with an error code if it has any significant doubts about the integrity of the email it's reading, or any other serious error occurs.

Unit Tests

All the unit tests are in the tests/ directory. You can run them from the Makefile using the unittest or unittest_test targets (the second is more verbose, and stops on failing tests).

Code Coverage

There is a code coverage target in the Makefile. You'll need to have the coverage Python module installed (pip3 install coverage) to run it.

Debian/Ubuntu

• Install all the package dependencies listed in the control file. In addition, to run the unit tests, you will need to install:

  • python3-freezegun - only available in Ubuntu 14.10 onwards - see http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=python3-freezegun.

  • python3-reportlab

  • python3-pdfminer3k (not a standard Debian/Ubuntu package, but there is a supplied Makefile target which will create it for you using a Docker container - run make rundocker_getdebs)

OSX

• Install Homebrew
• brew install python3
• brew install libmagic
• pip3 install beautifulsoup4 freezegun lxml pdfminer3k pypdf2 python-magic reportlab