Dealing with atachments.

[Punto]

Hi.. I'm writting the scripts for a "free e-mail" site (I hate those sites), and I have troubles taking care of 2 things:

- the delivery of the e-mails (I'm looking in sendmail.org for that)
- the attachments.

So: how could I handle the attachments in perl? Is there a module? does it have easy documentation with nice examples? :-)

also: is there any open souce solution for that, so I don't have to do anyrthing? :-)

Thanks..

[lhoward]

For dealing with attachments use one of the perl MIME modules. I find that MIME::Lite has been strong-enough to do anything I've ever needed with attachments/multipart messages. Here's an example of its usage taken from the MIME::Lite documentation:

       use MIME::Lite;

           # Create a new multipart message:
           $msg = new MIME::Lite
                       From    =>'[e-mail]',
                       To      =>'[e-mail]',
                       Cc      =>'[e-mail], [e-mail]',
                       Subject =>'A message with 2 parts...',
                       Type    =>'multipart/mixed';

           # Add parts (each "attach" has same arguments as "new"):
           attach $msg
                       Type     =>'TEXT',
                       Data     =>"Here's the GIF file you wanted";
           attach $msg
                       Type     =>'image/gif',
                       Path     =>'aaa000123.gif',
                       Filename =>'logo.gif';

Once you have your message constructed with attachments then you need to send it. I prefer to use Net::SMTP to send messages, but there are several other perl modules that can send mail (and several ways of just doing it by hand). If you're already using MIME::Lite the easiest method is to use its built-in send function:

        $msg->send;

If you're interested in delving deeper, O'Reilly has a decent book entitled Programming Internet Email that covers most of the interesting internet e-mail protocols and formats. It has a good chapter on e-mail related Perl modules.

[Punto]

That a good example.. thanks..
And, can I use that module if I get the attachment, to convert it to a file?

Thanks..

[lhoward]

MIME::Lite can only encode MIME streams. For decoding a MIME message you'll want to use the MIME::Decoder module.

[httptech]

I just posted this snippet which should help you with decoding and extracting attachments from incoming emails.

[BBQ]

> also: is there any open souce solution for that, so I don't have to do anyrthing?

You probably already know this, but there are quite a few people out there that make this same mistake: Being Open Source'd does not imply that you'll have everything done for you. As a matter of fact, it usually implies that you should do some of the work yourself so that others can benefit from it too! I hate being such a rant, but I've seen freeware, open source, and GPL mistaken and mixed quite a few number of times. (Haven't we all?)

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!