mboxgrep is a small utility that scans a mailbox for messages matching a regular expression. Found messages can be either displayed on standard output, counted, deleted, piped to a shell command or written to another mailbox.

Features

• support for mbox (either plain or compressed), MH, nnmh, nnml and maildir folders
• ability of reading mbox folders and out from another mboxgrep process from standard input
• support for basic and extended POSIX regular expressions, and optionally, Perl-compatible regular expressions (if linked with the PCRE library)
• ability of limiting the search to message body or headers (although the whole message is scanned by default)
• message counting
• recursive search through directories
• ability to invert the sense of matching
• ability to write found messages to another mailbox
• filtering duplicate messages

Versions

• current unstable version is 0.7.13
• current stable version is not yet available