The previous answers are good, but to sum them up:

The DESTROY method is not something you call to destroy an object — it's something Perl calls when the object is being destroyed.

Keep in mind that I'm fairly new to Perl myself, but...

...from what I know, the best course of action is to simply let the garbage collector do its work. Declare $MIMEobject as a lexical variable inside your if() { ... } block; once it goes out of scope and once there are no references to it anymore, the garbage collector will automatically reclaim it. There's no need to explicitely call DESTROY.

If you want to release it ASAP, you could also undef it.

May the more enlightened monks correct me if I'm wrong!

This is correct; you should never explicitly invoke DESTROY, it will be called once the reverence reference count goes to zero. If you need to explicitly invoke DESTROY, you're doing it wrong.

Update: Facepalm. Well spotted, Your Mother.

---

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

Reverence count? The monastery has gone to your head. :P

Hi,

in addition to what was said before. This snippet should show you that you don't need to explicitly call DESTROY:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Email::Stuffer;

{
    package MyMail;
    use parent 'Email::MIME';

    sub DESTROY {
        my ($self) = @_;
        say "in DESTROY";
    }
}

# Get a Email::MIME object easily
my $email = Email::Stuffer->from('huhu@yahoo.de')
    ->to('you@yahoo.de')
    ->text_body('Hi you!')
    ->email;

foreach my $nr (1..2) {
    my $e = MyMail->new($email->as_string);
    say "Should be before DESTROY";
}
say "Atfter Loop";
[download]

As soon as your last reference to the object goes out of scope the DESTROY method gets called.

Regards
McA

undef is what you want

FWIW, DESTROY is for breaking circular references (parent/child), freeing xs/c-pointers and things like that ...

Email::MIME doesn't have a DESTROY ...

$MIMEobject->DESTROY;

The DESTROY method will get called automatically when the last reference to the object goes away, you shouldn't call it yourself and it won't do what you want. What you want instead is undef $MIMEobject; (or $MIMEobject=undef;, same thing), and you'll want to undef any other references to the object that you might have.

In general, you normally don't need to worry much about Perl's memory management, as long as you don't have circular references objects will be freed automatically when the last reference to them goes away. All that you have to make sure of is that you stop referring to the object.

crack out the attachments into files

To close this topic ...

I have taken the "Don't worry, be happy" advise above. Actually, I have realized that I was already taking it in the following code fragment.

foreach my $part ($MIMEhandle->subparts)
  {
  if( $part->content_type =~ m/text\/plain/i ) {return $part->body;};
  };
[download]