Extracting a list of email addresses from a mail header

[nate]

Is there a function in one of the assorted CPAN mail modules that can return all of the email addresses from a mail header in a list? I need to be able to find all the addresses an email is being sent to.

[ZZamboni]

Take a look at the MailTools package from Graham Barr. In particular, Mail::Internet, Mail::Header and Mail::Address may be what you are looking for. Also, doing a search for Mail:: on CPAN yields some results that may be interesting.

--ZZamboni

[nate]

Thanks for the pointers -- I finally got it, but it's a little messy:

use Mail::Internet;
use Mail::Address;

my @mail;

while(<>) { push @mail, $_; }
#read mail from STDIN and put it in @MAIL

my $EMAIL = new Mail::Internet([@mail]);
my $header = $EMAIL->head();
my @hlines;

push @hlines, $header->get('To');
push @hlines, $header->get('Cc');
push @hlines, $header->get('Bcc');
#thanks [ZZamboni]...

my @addr;
foreach (@hlines) {
  my $line = $_;
  $line =~ s/^\w+\:(.*)$/$1/gs;
   #this is necessary to cut off the initial "To:" from the
   #header line -- I'm not sure why Address::Parse doesn't
   #do this
    
  push (@addr, Mail::Address->parse($line));
}

#we now have a list of address objects -- convert to text addresses
foreach (@addr) { $_ = $_->address }

#our addresses are now in @addr

if anyone has any suggestions to tidy this up, please post. Esp. clipping the "To:", "cc:", and "bcc:" seems like it shouldn't need to be there -- but this worked on my test emails.

[ZZamboni]

I think you are bypassing the documented interface of Mail::Header by accessing its internal data like that (mail_hdr_hash). The following gives you the headers with the keyword removed:

push @hlines, $header->get('To');
push @hlines, $header->get('Cc');
push @hlines, $header->get('Bcc');

According to the Mail::Header documentation, get() in array context returns "a list of all the text from all the instances of TAG". Which should be what you are looking for.

--ZZamboni

[kryten]

You could try Mail::Header which is part of MailTools (but does not seem to show up on its own though :/) Which lets you maniplate the headers with relative ease. Although I do not think it has a function to return all the email addresses you could look through the relevant header fields and grab the addresses from there..

Update: It would appear that ZZamboni types faster than I do.

[Dominus]

Use the CPAN Email::Find module for that.