Re^5: How to parse outlook type attachment from inbox

[jdtoronto]

OK perlCrazy,

Time to back up here a little. Two questions:

• Why are you trying to parse header information from attachments?
• Why are you using proprietary headers rather than standard ones (X-MS-Has-Attach for example)?

Maybe if you told us what exactly you are trying to achieve it would make it easier for all of us.

jdtoronto

[perlCrazy]

Why are you trying to parse header information from attachments?

There are 50k emails are lyin in inbox all emails has come from one email address(ex: [e-mail]) and each email
is coming from end customer as attachment that is
containing sender address that will be hotmail address. Now all attachmnet it self is a mail that is why i need to p
arse header so i can get those email address.

Why are you using proprietary headers rather than standard ones (X-MS-Has-Attach for example)?

I opened the outlook options and found that all attachment information is like this only,
that is why i checked that condition. and it is storing all attachment OK. But i need to get the header info from attachment

[perlCrazy]

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Mail::POP3Client;
use MIME::Parser;
use MIME::Head;

use Mail::Header;

#usage() unless scalar @ARGV == 3;
my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client( HOST        => 'server',
                                USER        => 'my',
                                PASSWORD    => 'pass' );

my $tmp_directory = "/tmp/attach";
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_dir($tmp_directory);
$parser->output_prefix("attachment");
$parser->output_to_core();
open (FH,">>/tmp/msgtxt1");
for (my $i = 1; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++){
  my $head = $pop->Head($i);
  if ($head =~ /X-MS-Has-Attach: yes/i){

        foreach ( $pop->Head( $i ) ) {
                if( /^(From|Subject):\s+/i ) {
                        if ( /Vincent/) {
                                my $msg = $pop->HeadAndBody($i);
                                ### Automatically attempt to RFC-1522-
+decode the MIME headers?
                                $parser->decode_headers(1);           
+  ### default is false

                                ### Parse contained "message/rfc822" o
+bjects as nested MIME streams?
                                $parser->extract_nested_messages(0);  
+  ### default is true

                                ### Look for uuencode in "text" messag
+es, and extract it?
                                $parser->extract_uuencode(1);         
+  ### default is false

                                ### Should we forgive normally-fatal e
+rrors?
                                $parser->ignore_errors(0);            
+  ### default is true
                                my $entity = $parser->parse_data($msg)
+;

                        }
                }
        }
#        print "\n";

  }
}

close(FH);

$pop->Close();

sub usage {
    print "Usage: $0 <mail_server> <username> <password>\n";
    exit;
}


Above code does save all attachment. Now I need to parse those attachment
One of the attachment will be .msg file that contains header einfo etc.
I need to extarct those header info and find the sender address.
Can somebody help me in this.

[davorg]

I think you're overcomplicating this problem. So here's my final attempt to explain it to you.

MIME messages are hierarchical in nature. That is to say, a MIME message can contain other MIME messages which can, in turn, also contain other MIME messages and so on. So whatever you use to parse a MIME message, can also be used to parse its children.

In fact, MIME::Parser is cleverer than that, if you set the extract_nested_messages flag to 1 (which is the default value, I'm not sure why you changed it in your code) then it will produce a tree structure containing all of the MIME messages contained within your original message. You can see the structure of this tree with the dump_skeleton method and you can get the children of any given MIME message by using the parts method.

So, you've gone as far as getting the top level message in $entity. If you change the nested messages flag to 1 then your entity will contain sub-entities which you can access using $entity->parts. Each of these contained messages will be a MIME::Entity object and you can extract various parts of the message (like the headers) using the methods described in the documentation.

Is that clearer?