FetchMailAtt downloads email attachments from mail servers. It supports a rich set of configuration options for easy customiztion of the download process.

• Supports multiple mail providers: GMail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, and others.
• Encrypted mail server connection with SSL/TLS (IMAPS).
• Incremental download from the last download date.
• Grouping of download files into hierarchical folders.
• Group by: Year, Month, Date, From, Address, or Subject.
• Limit processing with date range, with previous N days, or with message limit.
• Filter on emails by: Subject, From, Address, or To/CC/BCC.
• Filter on files by: file type, file name, or min/max sizes.
• Parallel downloads.

Go to the Releases page to download a version of the package.

Java 8 JRE is needed on the computer for running.

The release package comes as a zip file. Unzip it to install. The directory layout of the installation:

• bin, the run scripts
• conf, the configuration files
• lib, the jar files

Config file is used to control the download process. It has simple name=value property lines.
The config files reside in the 'conf' directory.

The default.conf is used when none is specified on running the app. Edit this file for easy configuration.

Set the mail server connection credential and the mail server host

e.g.
mail.username = yourusername@gmail.com
mail.password = yourpassword
mail.host = imap.gmail.com

Set the download directory

download.directory = /opt/download

For the other optional properties, see the Configuration Options section below or see the conf/default.conf for details.

Program is launched by running one of the run scripts in bin. This runs on the default.conf file.

fetchmailatt

Run on a specific config file,

fetchmailatt -c myconfig.conf
fetchmailatt -c /full/path/myconfig.conf

Without full path, the classpath is searched for the myconfig.conf file. The conf directory is part of the classpath; any config file in it can be used. With full path, the specified config file is used.

To run with the default.conf file in the conf directory.

fetchmailatt

Run fetchmailatt -h for other command line options.

fetchmailatt -h

Apply execute mode to the fetchmailatt shell script to make it runnable.

chmod +x bin/fetchmailatt

When it runs, FetchMailAtt processes through the relevant mails once and then ends. To periodically look for new emails, schedule it to run periodically as a task on Windows Task Scheduler or schedule it with cron on Linux. The config property process.resume.from.last enables/disables resuming from last run to examine only the new emails.

Set up different tasks to run on different config files to download from different servers. Pass the specific config file as argument when setting up the task.

fetchmailatt -c server1.conf
fetchmailatt -c server2.conf
fetchmailatt -c server3.conf

When the config property process.resume.from.last is enabled, FetchMailAtt would only process new emails while skipping all the old emails. To force it to re-process the old emails, reset the saved state file.

fetchmailatt -r
fetchmailatt -r -c server1.conf

This removes the saved state file and processed the emails from beginning again.

To get SSL/TLS with user credential connection to gmail server working, enable Less secure app on the Google email account.

The config file controls all aspects of the download process.

Running without any command line arugment, the program uses the conf/default.conf for configuration. When called with -c config.conf, the conf/config.conf file is used. When called with -c /full/path/config.conf, the specified file on the path is used.

Since the conf files contain the email user credential, it's prudent to restrict read access to them to all beside yourself.

The mail sever host can be set with the following. Any IMAP server server is supported.

mail.host = imap.gmail.com

Set the mail store proptocol. It can be imap or imaps (for SSL/TLS secured connection).

mail.store.protocol = imaps

Set the mail folder to download. e.g. INBOX or SENT.

mail.folder = INBOX

The downloaded files can be saved at different folders based on some of their attributes: year, month, date, from, address, and subject.

To groups files according to their YEAR, e.g. DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY/{YEAR}/

download.groupby = year

To group files in hierarchical folders, e.g. DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY/{YEAR}/{MONTH}/{FROM}

download.groupby = year
download.groupby.2nd = month
download.groupby.3rd = from

There are a number of options to reduce the number of emails to process.

This limits the number of mails to process,

process.mail.limit = 100

This only processes the mails from date (mm/dd/yyyy) onward,

process.from.date = 07/07/2015

This only processes the mails upto date (mm/dd/yyyy),

process.to.date = 07/20/2015

This only processes the mails from the last N days. This supercedes the From/To properties.

process.previous.days = 7

This resumes processing from the last download date. This helps in the frequent periodic runnings of the program, to avoid processing any old mails.

process.resume.from.last = yes

The program supports downloading attachments in parallel. This increases the download throughput. To control the number of workers,

process.parallel.workers = 10

Often when running in the spawned process by the system scheduler, the output to the console is gone when the spawned process has terminated. The following property make the program sleep a number of seconds before exiting, allowing you to read the console output.

process.sleep.before.exit = 10

To process only the emails whose subject contains a term,

match.subject.contains = budget

To process only the emails sent by a user,

match.from.contains = bill

To process only the emails sent by an email address,

match.address.contains = foo@bar.com

To process only the emails sent to a recipient,

match.to.contains = bar@baz.com

To process only the emails CC or BCC to a recipient,

match.cc.contains = bar@baz.com
match.bcc.contains = bar@baz.com

To download only the files whose names contain,

match.file.name.contains = pattern1,pattern2,pattern3

To download only the files whose file types are,

match.file.type.is = csv,pdf,jpg,jpeg,png,gif

To download only the files whose file sizes are less than,

match.file.size.less.than=10m

To download only the files whose file sizes are greater than,

match.file.size.greater.than=1k

FetchMailAtt has minimal dependency.

• Java 8. JDK 8 is required for building.
• JavaMail jar.
• Activation jar, for secured authentication to mail server.

The build uses Gradle and its Java plugin for building. Set them up before running the build. The build file is at gradle.build.

To build a distribution,

gradle

The distribution is in build/distributions/fetchmailatt.zip, which contains fetchmailatt.jar and all the dependent jars, the start scripts, and the default.conf.

To run and test the app with build.gradle, which uses the conf/default.conf

gradle run

To pass arguments,

gradle run -Dargs="-h"
gradle run -Dargs="-v"
gradle run -Dargs="-c myserver.conf"
gradle run -Dargs="-r"

FetchMailAtt is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL). See the LICENSE file for detail. Basically you can incorporate the project into your work however you like (open source or proprietary) with proper attribution to the project, but when making change to the project itself, you need to release the changes under MPL.