Reading Mail::Message objects using Mail::POP3Client

[TheHobbit]

wise Monks,
After some month away from the monastery, I'm back with a maybe interesting question.

I'm developping a little application, one component of wich needs to download some mail messages from a POP3 account and do something with them according to data such as the From: address, the Subject header and (obviously) the contents.

I got this idea to use Mail::POP3Client for doing the download, and it works fine. But now I do not want to reinvent the wheel just another time, so I though to use the Mail::Message class to do the parsing for me.

Well, I'm unable to find a clean way to transform the string obtained by the HeadAndbody method of the Mail::POP3Client into a Mail::Message object (actually a subclass of it I defined).

So here comes the question. Am I too a blockhead to find how to do that, or realy this operation is so difficult?

Subsidiary question is: is there another way to parse a string conatining a mail message into some kind of structure allowing easy access to the different parts of the message?

Thank you and may your regex only match when they have to.

---

Leo TheHobbit

[dws]

I got this idea to use Mail::POP3Client for doing the download, and it works fine. But now I do not want to reinvent the wheel just another time, so I though to use the Mail::Message class to do the parsing for me.

If (or when) you start dealing with attachements, you might find that Mail::Message isn't sufficient. I recommend getting a copy of Lincon Stein's Network Programming with Perl. Chapter 8 gives a working example of dealing with MIME-encoded messages (of which non-encoded messages are a trivial subset) using MIME::Parser.

[jlongino]

As dws says for attachment processing mime::parser is ideal. Here is an example of Mail::POP3Client access and MIME::Parser for parsing.

As for determining the pure text portion of the message, I've found that Mail::MboxParser is usually the easiest way to obtain it. Here is an example how to obtain the "text message" portion, if the E-mail contains one.

--Jim

[true]

I did it the hard way and wrote my own parser. It's really fat (not phat in a good way) and still has some problems. Namely, really large attachments can bog it down. I had to add a kill statement incase a user wasn't patient. Plus i needed a subroutine for every attachment type too. Still not done, always adding file types i never heard of. If you brave the rapids, it was a good exercise for me avec decoding/encoding/parsing.

Source code found at: http://perl.to/lib/webmailcgi.txt

For runnning on a webserver, put it in a folder on your website with suexec enabled. The webmail.cgi program builds the folder structure needed to run.

Edit by dws to fix formatting