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.

For more information on hacking/developing email2pdf, please see HACKING.md. Note that use is subject to the [license conditions] (https://github.com/andrewferrier/email2pdf/blob/master/LICENSE.txt).

Installing Dependencies

Before you can use email2pdf, you need to install some dependencies. The instructions here are split out by platform:

Debian/Ubuntu

• wkhtmltopdf - 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 - Install using apt-get install getmail.

• Others - there are some other Python library dependencies. Run make builddeb to create a .deb package, then install it with dpkg -i mydeb.deb.

OS X

• wkhtmltopdf - Install the package from http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html.

• getmail - TODO: This hasn't been tested, so there are no instructions here yet! Note that getmail is optional.

• Install Homebrew

• xcode-select --install (for lxml, because of this)

• brew install python3 (or otherwise make sure you have Python 3 and pip3 available).

• brew install libmagic

• pip3 install beautifulsoup4 lxml pypdf2 python-magic requests

Configuring 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.