How to read local unix-style mail

[Cody Fendant]

I'm on OSX and I can send mail directly to my user account using simply <username>@<ipaddress> as the address.

This is the kind of classic email you would read using pine or elm or something. "You have new mail from cron in /var/spool/mail/root" -style email.

How would I read mail that using Perl?

[LanX]

When do you want to read the mails?

Do you want to poll several of them out of the inbox every interval or do you want to trigger a process instantly for each incoming mail? For the latter see procmail and family.

For the rest see The Evolution of Perl Email Handling (I googled it for you :)

[hippo]

It depends how fully-functional you want your "read" operation to be. Towards the top end of the scale is Mail::Box::Mbox - but if you think that's overkill then you'll have to be a bit more specific about how you want to "read" it and what other operations should be involved.

[ww]

If there's really some reason pine and relatives won't do, you might start by searching CPAN using "mail" as a keyword.