Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
laziness, impatience, and hubris
 
PerlMonks  

Retrieving email and decoding attachments

by jtapper (Initiate)
on Sep 25, 2002 at 21:11 UTC ( [id://200742]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

jtapper has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am interested in writing a perl script that will log onto my pop3 account and retrieve all the email, and save any attachments into a local directory.

I've already written something to check my email but I have no idea how to implement retrieving and saving attachments.

can somebody point me in the right direction? thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Retrieving email and decoding attachments
by trs80 (Priest) on Sep 25, 2002 at 21:43 UTC
    The Mail::MboxParser module offers a nice interface to achieve this.

    MIME::Parser is one of the most robust mail parsing moudles that you may also want to consider, but it has a steep learning curve in my opinion.
    Update As valdez points out you will need something like Mail::POP3Client to get the mails, I misread your post and thought for some strange reason you already had the messages locally.
Re: Retrieving email and decoding attachments
by valdez (Monsignor) on Sep 25, 2002 at 22:32 UTC
Re: Retrieving email and decoding attachments
by jlongino (Parson) on Sep 26, 2002 at 06:56 UTC
    This script should do what you want. I looked at several modules trying to find one that does everything, but lately I find that most mail related modules do one or two very specific things well, but for anything but the simplest tasks end up using more than one to get the job done. In this case, Mail::POP3Client is a good POP3 access tool but MIME::Parser is hard to beat for saving attachments to disk:
    #!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Mail::POP3Client; use MIME::Parser; my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client( USER => "user", PASSWORD => "password", HOST => "pop3.server" ); ## for HeadAndBodyToFile() to use my $fh = new IO::Handle(); ## Initialize stuff for MIME::Parser; my $outputdir = "./mimemail"; my $parser = new MIME::Parser; $parser->output_dir($outputdir); my $i; ## process all messages in pop3 inbox for ($i = 1; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++) { open (MAILOUT, ">pop3.msg$i"); $fh->fdopen( fileno( MAILOUT ), "w" ); ## write current msg to file $pop->HeadAndBodyToFile( $fh, $i ); close MAILOUT; ## MIME::Parser handles only one msg at-a-time open (MAILIN, "<pop3.msg$i"); ## flush all attachments this msg to ./mimemail dir using internal +filename my $entity = $parser->read(\*MAILIN); close MAILIN; }
    BTW, this was done hastily and could use more error testing, could probably be done more simply/elegantly, but I leave that for the poster.

    Does anyone know how to read the messages directly to MIME::Parser without having to write the intermediate files first? I've encountered this dilemma recently trying to combine other unrelated mail modules.

    --Jim

      This works too and is a bit simpler.
      for ($i = 1; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++) { print "$i \n"; my $msg; $msg = $pop->HeadAndBody( $i ); my $entity = $parser->parse_data($msg); }
        Wow! That was great! It works like a charm! Thank you!
      Thanks, works well after all these years
Re: Retrieving email and decoding attachments
by TuftyTrue (Novice) on Jun 29, 2008 at 09:45 UTC
    Thansk guys, I've got it up and working now with the library you recommended! Ta TT

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: perlquestion [id://200742]
Approved by trs80
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others surveying the Monastery: (5)
As of 2024-03-28 08:42 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found