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

Hi.. I'm writting the scripts for a "free e-mail" site (I hate those sites), and I have troubles taking care of 2 things:

- the delivery of the e-mails (I'm looking in sendmail.org for that)
- the attachments.

So: how could I handle the attachments in perl? Is there a module? does it have easy documentation with nice examples? :-)

also: is there any open souce solution for that, so I don't have to do anyrthing? :-)

Thanks..

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Dealing with atachments.
by lhoward (Vicar) on May 17, 2000 at 15:24 UTC
    For dealing with attachments use one of the perl MIME modules. I find that MIME::Lite has been strong-enough to do anything I've ever needed with attachments/multipart messages. Here's an example of its usage taken from the MIME::Lite documentation: 
           use MIME::Lite;

           # Create a new multipart message:
           $msg = new MIME::Lite
                       From    =>'me@myhost.com',
                       To      =>'you@yourhost.com',
                       Cc      =>'some@other.com, some@more.com',
                       Subject =>'A message with 2 parts...',
                       Type    =>'multipart/mixed';

           # Add parts (each "attach" has same arguments as "new"):
           attach $msg
                       Type     =>'TEXT',
                       Data     =>"Here's the GIF file you wanted";
           attach $msg
                       Type     =>'image/gif',
                       Path     =>'aaa000123.gif',
                       Filename =>'logo.gif';

    [download]
    Once you have your message constructed with attachments then you need to send it. I prefer to use Net::SMTP to send messages, but there are several other perl modules that can send mail (and several ways of just doing it by hand). If you're already using MIME::Lite the easiest method is to use its built-in send function: 
            $msg->send;

    [download]
    If you're interested in delving deeper, O'Reilly has a decent book entitled Programming Internet Email that covers most of the interesting internet e-mail protocols and formats. It has a good chapter on e-mail related Perl modules.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      That a good example.. thanks..
      And, can I use that module if I get the attachment, to convert it to a file?

      Thanks..

[reply]
        I just posted this snippet which should help you with decoding and extracting attachments from incoming emails.
[reply]
        MIME::Lite can only encode MIME streams. For decoding a MIME message you'll want to use the MIME::Decoder module.
[reply]
RE: Dealing with atachments.
by BBQ (Curate) on May 17, 2000 at 18:43 UTC
    > also: is there any open souce solution for that, so I don't have to do anyrthing?

    You probably already know this, but there are quite a few people out there that make this same mistake: Being Open Source'd does not imply that you'll have everything done for you. As a matter of fact, it usually implies that you should do some of the work yourself so that others can benefit from it too! I hate being such a rant, but I've seen freeware, open source, and GPL mistaken and mixed quite a few number of times. (Haven't we all?)

    #!/home/bbq/bin/perl
    # Trust no1!
[reply]

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