How to access some email, and print a specific mail's message body?

Question

I have an email address email_reports@coldmail.com , on which some reports are received daily. How can I access that mail through a terminal, find a specific mail that I need (say, check the headers or the body for string DEBUG: Daily Data Report ), and print out it's body to a file in a single piped command? I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and the standard mail command, as well as mutt . I've tried searching for such functionality online, but all I've managed to find is guides on how to set up various mail agents, but not to process emails in a script-like fashion.

Answer 1

See http://harrybailey.com/2009/02/send-or-pipe-an-email-to-a-php-script/ for an excellent article on how to pipe incoming mail to a script. This technique can be used to pipe incoming mail to just about any kind of script, be it php, perl, python, etc.