kdeldycke / mail-deduplicate

What is Mail Deduplicate?

Provides the mdedup CLI, an utility to deduplicate mails from a set of boxes.

Features

• Duplicate detection based on cherry-picked and normalized mail headers.
• Fetch mails from multiple sources.
• Reads and writes to mbox, maildir, babyl, mh and mmdf formats.
• Deduplication strategies based on size, content, timestamp, file path or random choice.
• Copy, move or delete the resulting set of duplicates.
• Dry-run mode.
• Protection against false-positives with safety checks on size and content differences.
• Supports macOS, Linux and Windows.
• Shell auto-completion for Bash, Zsh and Fish.

⚠️ Warning: Performances

mdedup implementation is quite naive at the moment and everything resides in memory.

If this is good enough for a volume of a couple of gigabytes, the more emails mdedup try to parse, the closer you'll reach the memory limits of your machine. In which case mdedup will exit abrubtly, zapped by the OOM killer of your OS. Of course your mileage may vary depending on your hardware.

You can influence implementation of this feature with pull requests, or purchase of business support 🤝 and sponsorship 🫶.

Example

Quickstart

Easiest way is to install mdedup with pipx:

$ pipx install mail-deduplicate

Other alternatives installation methods are available in the documentation.