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

I recently had the misfortune of accidently directing MS Outlook Express to download *delete* my Imap mail. Well I sought an answer to getting it back on Google, and I managed to select all of it and "forward" it to myself, saving it as one giant mime (or quasi-Mime) file.But it is not am mbox file anymore, but a huge multipart-mixed file, with hints like:
"X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200"

I am looking for some perl to split these things up back into normal mbox format.

Yes, it would be a fun exercise in Perl using Mime::Tools, but I really don't have the time to write this for one file. (Nor do I hope to do this ever again)

Anyone already write something like this? PS: Tried to coax Pine to read it.. NG

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: One-off mime splitter
by guillaume (Pilgrim) on Aug 18, 2001 at 21:07 UTC
    You don't give much details, but I think this (from the Mime::tools documentation) could be of some help:
    Here's some pretty basic code for parsing a MIME message,
and outputting its decoded components to a given directory:

use MIME::Parser;

### Create parser, and set some parsing options:
    my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
    $parser->output_under("$ENV{HOME}/mimemail");

### Parse input:
    $entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";

### Take a look at the top-level entity (and any parts it has):
    $entity->dump_skeleton;

    [download]
    You should use MIME::Tools. If it's because you didn't want to install it, a quick
    perl -MCPAN -e "install MIME::Tools"

    [download]

    will do the job for you.

    And remember, even for a one-time task you are better off reusing existing code. Some may say that doing otherwise is a form of "False Impatience" :-)

    Guillaume
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      $entity would be the single email with lots of attachments - each one is an individual email (possibly with attachments)- phew!

      So... I think you want to add something like this:
      foreach my $email ($entity->parts())
{
   # $email is now a MIME::Entity
   # I.e. one of the original emails that
   # was mistakenly combined into one.

   # either print the email, or capture it with
   # one of the "as_string" methods and use OLE
   # to stuff it back into Outlook.
   $email->print(\*STDOUT)
}

      [download]
      This is all from memory - I wrote a mail filter last week to do some virus scanning. But might help.

      Error: Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue.
[reply]
[d/l]

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