UTF8 issue with Net::POP3

[chuntuk]

I'm trying to read the "from" and "subject" fields from the messages in a POP3 mailbox (I don't care about the content of the messages), and have cobbled together the following code from online examples:

use Net::POP3;

# $MAILSERVER,$MAILUSER,$MAILPASS defined here!

# Constructors
$pop = Net::POP3->new($MAILSERVER);

if ($pop->login($MAILUSER, $MAILPASS) > 0) {
   my $msgnums = $pop->list; # hashref of msgnum => size
   foreach my $msgnum (keys %$msgnums) {
     my $head = $pop->top($msgnum,0);
     my ($subject, $from) = analyze_header($head);

     print "From: $from ; Subject: $subject \n";
   }
}
$pop->quit;
print "done.\n";

sub analyze_header {
  my $header_array_ref = shift;

  my $header = join "", @$header_array_ref;

  my ($subject) = $header =~ /Subject: (.*)/m;
  my ($from   ) = $header =~ /From: (.*)/m;

  return ($subject, $from);
}

It works, insofar as it successfully logs in and reads the (two identical) messages, but this is the output I get:

starting...
From: "=?utf-8?B?Q2hyaXMgSHVudA==?=" <[e-mail]> ; Subject: =?
+utf-8?B?VGVzdA==?= 
From: "=?utf-8?B?Q2hyaXMgSHVudA==?=" <[e-mail]> ; Subject: =?
+utf-8?B?VGVzdA==?= 
done.

The contents of the header fields appear (I assume) to be encoded somehow into utf-8, but how do I decode it into something I can make sense of? I assume there must be some standard method of doing this, but none of the documentation I could find gives me any help.

[runrig]

use Encode ();

$subject = Encode::decode('MIME-Header', $subject);

[chuntuk]

That's done it - thanks. Wish the docs would mention, somewhere, that you need to do that. Everything seems to assume that once you've retrieved a message, you're done.

[runrig]

Also, consider using MIME::Head to parse MIME headers.

[Anonymous Monk]

To be fair, the module name, Net::POP3, hints that it only does the POP3 protocol. It does not try to parse the headers or MIME attachments or anything. That's some other module's job.