Extract PEC and/or EML attachments

Sometimes you receive emails that are a little harder than usual to be read. It’s not because they have been written in a different language, rather because your client cannot immediatly display the email content. This happens when you receive an .eml file.
In Italy, sadly, this is a quite spread behavior because we have something called PEC, that stands for Posta Elettronica Certificata (Certified email): it is an e-mail sent via specific providers that handshake themselves in order to ensure the delivery of the content.
Yes, I know, we are now in 2022, and there is no added value, according to me, with this infrastructure. I mean, encrypting and signing emails can do the same, and today’s providers are reliable.
Anyway, when someone sends you a PEC and you don’t have a PEC enabled addressee mailbox, your email appears as an email with an attached .eml file. The odds are that such file contains the attachment you want to get.
How to achieve this without involving a complex email client?
mpack to the rescue!
mpack is a suite of tools to deal with eml files, and it can be installed via your distribution package manager, for instance:



The most interesting tool of the mpack suite, at least with regard to the scope of this article, is munpack. mupack is a command that reads an .eml file and extract every single part (of a multipart message), that is it can extract attachments:



And that’s all folks!