Hypermail is a free, portable program that takes a file of mail messages in UNIX mailbox format and generates an archive of cross-referenced HTML documents.
You can use hypermail to process existing mailboxes. You can also use it to convert messages that arrive on-the-fly andq add them to an existing hypermail message archive.
An hypermail archive is made of indexes and messages. Indexes sort the messages in the archive by author, subject, date, and thread. Messages show a configurable summary of a message's headers and the message's attachments, such as images. A message will also include links to other messages, such as next and previous received message or next and previous message in a thread.
- HTML5 markup reviewed for accessibility
- User customizable headers, footers
- Use of external CSS to customize look and feel
- Possiblity of adding javascript for further customization
- Generated archives can be browsed online (thru a web browser) or offline (thru your file system)
You can see an example of hypermail in action in any of W3C's public mailing list archives, for example, here.
Hypermail is still active and under development.
The main repository of hypermail is on github:
https://github.com/hypermail-project/hypermail
We follow a trunk-based development model.
The main branch has the on-going cutting edge development; if you want a stable release, please select the most recent release from the hypermail releases page. In addition to the packaged releases, each stable release is tagged.
Please refer to Release Notes and the Changelog for the list of recent changes.
There is no active dedicated mailing list for hypermail support or development.
Please use hypermail's github repository issue tracker for all bug reports, feature requests, patches, and other program-related things. This project is under low-maintenance / development priority.
If you detect an issue with hypermail, please open a new issue given your operating system version, hypermail version, and the steps allowing to reproduce it. If the issue occurs when processing a specific message, please include an anonymzed copy message that allows to reproduce the issue in your report.
If you want to open a merge request that solves an issue, please first test your issue against the main branch. If you still have the issue, fork the repository, create a branch against main and then do a PR.
Hypermail is written in C.
Detailed instructions on dependencies, how to compile and install it are given in the INSTALL file. For a description of how to use it, see the hypermail.html, hmrc.html, and faq.html files that come in the docs/ directory. Take the time to read the KNOWN_BUGS file so that you are aware of things that might affect your use of hypermail.
You can try out hypermail after compiling it, without needing to install it.
In the next instructions we're going to use hypermail to generate an archive
from the y2k.mbox sample mbox and to park the archive in the
/tmp/hypermail-test directory (feel free to try it out with any mbox file
you have).
cd src/hypermail
./hypermail -m ../tests/mboxes/y2k.mbox -d /tmp/hypermail-test
You can browse the archive by opening one of the generated indexes, e.g.,
firefox /tmp/hypermail-test/index.html
- archive - general archive utilites that are useful in managing list archives. Much of the functionality here has been rendered obsolete by the folder_by_date option.
- contrib - contributed hypermail related utilities
- configs - sample hypermail configuration files
- docs - documentation and documentation support files
- src - here's the beef
- tests - directory for supporting local testing
Please note that other than src and some docs, the content in some of these directories is outdated.
If you make a hypermail mailing list archive available behind a web server, please take into account that messages can be crafted to bypass security measures you have in place.
HTML attachment can be used to use server side includes (SSI) directives, include javascript scripts to do XSS or other kinds of attacks. Attachments can be PHP or other scripts that could be interpreted by your web server.
It is important to disable all those web server features in the directory where an hypermail archive will be stored. You can also customize hypermail to only allow some specific attachments. You can also associate a hypermail directory with a CSP policy to disable or restrict javascript use from within an HTML document.
We advise you to follow the the least-privilege principle: restrict / disable features available to a hypermail archive and enable them one by one as required, after evaluating they are safe.
Please read the INSTALL file for more details.
You'll find the image hypermail.png included with the source; this icon is for your use in your Hypermail-related pages and links to them. If you are talented with graphics and would like to donate new icons and images to the hypermail effort, please feel free.