Provide mail-objects and methods upon
See Mail::MboxParser for an outline on usage. Examples however are also provided in this manpage further below.
Mail::MboxParser::Mail objects are usually not created directly though, in theory, they could be. A description of the provided methods can be found in Mail::MboxParser.
However, go on reading if you want to use methods from MIME::Entity and learn about overloading.
This is usually not called directly but instead by \*(C`get_messages()\*(C'. You could however create a mail-object manually providing the header and body each as either one string or as an array-ref representing the lines. Here is a common scenario: Retrieving mails from a remote POP-server using Mail::POP3Client and directly feeding each mail to \*(C`Mail::MboxParser::Mail->new\*(C':
use Mail::POP3Client;
use Mail::MboxParser::Mail;
my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client (...);
for my $i (1 .. $pop->Count) {
my $msg = Mail::MboxParser::Mail->new( [ $pop->Head($i) ],
[ $pop->Body($i) ] );
$msg->store_all_attachments( path => '/home/user/dump' );
}
The above effectively behaves like an attachment-only retriever.
Returns the mail-header as a hash-ref with header-fields as keys. All keys are turned to lower-case, so $header{Subject} has to be written as $header{subject}. If a header-field occurs more than once in the header, the value of the key is an array_ref. Example: my $field = $msg->header->{field}; print $field->[0]; # first occurance of 'field' print $field->[1]; # second one ...
Returns the \*(L"From \*(R"-line of the message.
This method returns the \*(L"Received: \*(R"-lines of the message as a list.
Returns a Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Body object. For methods upon that see further below. When called with the argument n, the n-th body of the message is retrieved. That is, the body of the n-th entity. Sets \*(C`$mail->error\*(C' if something went wrong.
This will return an index number that represents what Mail::MboxParser::Mail considers to be the actual (main)-body of an email. This is useful if you don't know about the structure of a message but want to retrieve the message's signature for instance: $signature = $msg->body($msg->find_body)->signature; Changes are good that find_body does what it is supposed to do.
Returns a Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Convertable object. For details on what you can do with it, read Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Convertable.
Returns the specified raw field from the message header, that is: the fieldname is not stripped off nor is any decoding done. Returns multiple lines as needed if the field is \*(L"Received\*(R" or another multi-line field. Not case sensitive. \*(C`get_field()\*(C' always returns one string regardless of how many times the field occured in the header. Multiple occurances are separated by a newline and multiple whitespaces squeezed to one. That means you can process each occurance of the field thusly: for my $field ( split /\n/, $msg->get_field('received') ) { # do something with $field } Sets \*(C`$mail->error\*(C' if the field was not found in which case \*(C`get_field()\*(C' returns \*(C`undef\*(C'.
Returns a hash-ref with the two fields 'name' and 'email'. Returns \*(C`undef\*(C' if empty. The name-field does not necessarily contain a value either. Example: print $mail->from->{email}; On behalf of suggestions I received from users, from() tries to be smart when 'name'is empty and 'email' has the form '[email protected]'. In this case, 'name' is set to \*(L"First Name\*(R".
Returns an array of hash-references of all to-fields in the mail-header. Fields are the same as those of \*(C`$mail->from\*(C'. Example: for my $recipient ($mail->to) { print $recipient->{name} || "<no name>", "\n"; print $recipient->{email}; } The same 'name'-smartness applies here as described under \*(C`from()\*(C'.
Identical with to() but returning the hash-refed \*(L"Cc: \*(R"-line. The same 'name'-smartness applies here as described under \*(C`from()\*(C'.
Returns the message-id of a message cutting off the leading and trailing '<' and '>' respectively.
Returns the number of MIME-entities. That is, the number of sub-entitities actually. If 0 is returned and you think this is wrong, check \*(C`$mail->log\*(C'.
Either returns an array of all MIME::Entity objects or one particular if called with a number. If no entity whatsoever could be found, an empty list is returned. \*(C`$mail->log\*(C' instantly called after get_entities will give you some information of what internally may have failed. If set, this will be an error raised by MIME::Entity but you don't need to worry about it at all. It's just for the record.
Returns the body of the n-th MIME::Entity as a single string, undef otherwise in which case you could check \*(C`$mail->error\*(C'.
Stores the stringified body of n-th entity to the specified filehandle. That's basically the same as: my $body = $mail->get_entity_body(0); print FILEHANDLE $body; and could be shortened to this: $mail->store_entity_body(0, handle => \*FILEHANDLE); It returns a true value on success and undef on failure. In this case, examine the value of $mail->error since the entity you specified with 'n' might not exist.
It is really just a call to store_entity_body but it will take care that the n-th entity really is a saveable attachment. That is, it wont save anything with a MIME-type of, say, text/html or so. Unless further 'options' have been given, an attachment (if found) is stored into the current directory under the recommended filename given in the MIME-header. 'options' are specified in key/value pairs: key: | value: | description: ===========|================|=============================== path | relative or | directory to store attachment (".") | absolute | | path | -----------|----------------|------------------------------- encode | encoding | Some platforms store files | suitable for | in e.g. UTF-8. Specify the | Encode::encode | appropriate encoding here and | | and the filename will be en- | | coded accordingly. -----------|----------------|------------------------------- store_only | a compiled | store only files whose file | regex-pattern | names match this pattern -----------|----------------|------------------------------- code | an anonym | first argument will be the | subroutine | $msg-object, second one the | | index-number of the current | | MIME-part | | should return a filename for | | the attachment -----------|----------------|------------------------------- prefix | prefix for | all filenames are prefixed | filenames | with this value -----------|----------------|------------------------------- args | additional | this array-ref will be passed | arguments as | on to the 'code' subroutine | array-ref | as a dereferenced array Example: $msg->store_attachment(1, path => "/home/ethan/", code => sub { my ($msg, $n, @args) = @_; return $msg->id."+$n"; }, args => [ "Foo", "Bar" ]); This will save the attachment found in the second entity under the name that consists of the message-ID and the appendix \*(L"+1\*(R" since the above code works on the second entity (that is, with index = 1). 'args' isn't used in this example but should demonstrate how to pass additional arguments. Inside the 'code' sub, @args equals (\*(L"Foo\*(R", \*(L"Bar\*(R"). If 'path' does not exist, it will try to create the directory for you. You can specify to save only files matching a certain pattern. To do that, use the store-only switch: $msg->store_attachment(1, path => "/home/ethan/", store_only => qr/\.jpg$/i); The above will only save files that end on '.jpg', not case-sensitive. You could also use a non-compiled pattern if you want, but that would make for instance case-insensitive matching a little cumbersome: store_only => '(?i)\.jpg$' If you are working on a platform that requires a certain encoding for filenames on disk, you can use the 'encode' option. This becomes necessary for instance on Mac \s-1OS\s0 X which internally is \s-1UTF-8\s0 based. If the filename contains 8bit characters (like the German umlauts or French accented characters as in 'e\*''), storing the attachment under a non-encoded name will most likely fail. In this case, use something like this: $msg->store_attachment(1, path => '/tmp', encode => 'utf-8'); See Encode::Supported for a list of encodings that you may use. Returns the filename under which the attachment has been saved. undef is returned in case the entity did not contain a saveable attachment, there was no such entity at all or there was something wrong with the 'path' you specified. Check \*(C`$mail->error\*(C' to find out which of these possibilities apply.
Walks through an entire mail and stores all apparent attachments. 'options' are exactly the same as in \*(C`store_attachment()\*(C' with the same behaviour if no options are given. Returns a list of files that have been successfully saved and an empty list if no attachment could be extracted. \*(C`$mail->error\*(C' will tell you possible failures and a possible explanation for that.
This method returns a mapping from attachment-names (if those are saveable) to index-numbers of the MIME-part that represents this attachment. It returns a hash-reference, the file-names being the key and the index the value: my $mapping = $msg->get_attachments; for my $filename (keys %$mapping) { print "$filename => $mapping->{$filename}\n"; } If called with a string as argument, it tries to look up this filename. If it can't be found, undef is returned. In this case you also should have an error-message patiently awaiting you in the return value of \*(C`$mail->error\*(C'. Even though it looks tempting, don't do the following: # BAD!
for my $file (qw/file1.ext file2.ext file3.ext file4.ext/) { print "$file is in message ", $msg->id, "\n" if defined $msg->get_attachments($file); } The reason is that \*(C`get_attachments()\*(C' is currently not optimized to cache the filename mapping. So, each time you call it on (even the same) message, it will scan it from beginning to end. Better would be: # GOOD!
my $mapping = $msg->get_attachments; for my $file (qw/file1.ext file2.ext file3.ext file4.ext/) { print "$file is in message ", $msg->id, "\n" if exists $mapping->{$file}; }
Returns the message as one string. This is the method that string overloading depends on, so these two are the same: print $msg;
print $msg->as_string;
Mail::MboxParser::Mail implements an autoloader that will do the appropriate type-casts for you if you invoke methods from external modules. This, however, currently only works with MIME::Entity. Support for other modules will follow. Example:
my $mb = Mail::MboxParser->new("/home/user/Mail/received"); for my $msg ($mb->get_messages) { print $msg->effective_type, "\n"; }
\*(C`effective_type()\*(C' is not implemented by Mail::MboxParser::Mail and thus the corresponding method of MIME::Entity is automatically called.
To learn about what methods might be useful for you, you should read the \*(L"Access\*(R"-part of the section \*(L"\s-1PUBLIC\s0 \s-1INTERFACE\s0\*(R" in the MIME::Entity manpage. It may become handy if you have mails with a lot of MIME-parts and you not just want to handle binary-attachments but any kind of MIME-data.
Mail::MboxParser::Mail overloads the \*(L" \*(R" operator. Overloading operators is a fancy feature of Perl and some other languages (\*(C+ for instance) which will change the behaviour of an object when one of those overloaded operators is applied onto it. Here you get the stringified mail when you write $mail while otherwise you'd get the stringified reference: \*(C`Mail::MboxParser::Mail=HASH(...)\*(C'.
This is version 0.55.
Tassilo von Parseval <[email protected]>
Copyright (c) 2001-2005 Tassilo von Parseval. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
MIME::Entity
Mail::MboxParser, Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Body, Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Convertable