Gnus save encrypted messages in IMAP as plain text
==================================================


Bulk decrypt and save
---------------------

PGP-encryption is wonderful to protect the
confidentiallity of the message during transport.

But once received, the encryption makes it hard to
search in messages.

Gnus makes it possible to decrypt a number of messages
and save the plain text version to disk.

I started with an IMAP folder containing a number of
PGP-encrypted messages.

To create a archive with the decrypted version
we have to do the following steps.

* Select messages
* Run gnus-summary-save-article-file
* At the prompt, give the name of the file to save to

Select messages
---------------

This can be either be done by marking some messages
with the '#' key, or by giving a number as argument to
gnus-summary-save-article-file:

 (gnus-summary-save-article-file 42)
 will save the next 42 messages as plain text

 (gnus-summary-save-article-file -42)
 will save the previous 42 messages as plain text

Run gnus-summary-save-article-file:
-----------------------------------

A single message can be saved as plain text with the
keys 'O f'

The messages marked with '#' can also be saved in bulk
as plain text with the keys 'O f'

At the prompt, give the name of the file to save to
---------------------------------------------------

In either method, single file, marked file, or a
number of files, the name of the file to save the
plain text version to, has to be supplied.

After the first messages has been saved this way, the
supplied name will be prompted as default for the next.

This means, that just typen RET (Enter-key), the plain
text version of next message will appended to file, the
plain text version of first messsage was saved into.

This behaviour can be changed by setting a value
to gnus-prompt-before-saving,

Setting gnus-prompt-before-saving to 't'
.......................................

With gnus-prompt-before-saving set to 't', you are only
prompted once for the file name.

Setting gnus-prompt-before-saving to 'nil'
.........................................

By setting gnus-prompt-before-saving to 'nil, Gnus will
simply save all the articles in the default files.

See:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Saving-Articles.html

The messages are decrypted and then saved,
starting from the "From: <email-address" line.
A blank line is inserted between the messages.

Thanks
------

Thanks to Gijs Hillenius for helping me out with this.


Last edited: $Date: 2023/08/06 19:19:05 $

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