The problem which I am trying to solve is this: I have a backlog of about a gigabyte of unread mail on the POP3 server of my ISP.

I would like to download all the unread messages for later reading and sorting, and to start over with a new, empty mail queue. For download from the POP3 server, I plan to use getmail, and to configure it to deliver all the mail to a single local maildir, rather than to stdout.

Next, I need to write a Perl script to read messages from the local maildir and pass them to stdout for processing by the mail delivery agent maildrop. What I need here is a replacement for getmail, because I see in getmail no provision to fetch from a local maildir.

Mail::Maildir appears to me to be the proper module for this task.