shockme, I did have a debug print statement just to check that $msg_num was being set OK, I just omitted it from the code I posted - it's working OK.

The message number I've given does exist in the given mailspool.

print $folder->message($msg_num);
print $folder->message(0); # first message
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These two also produce a reference to a hash, with the first statement giving a different reference than the second (since I have been using $msg_num=2 or 3 as test cases).

No joy with those.

Cheers.

Baz.