I have written a simple email address capture program, without using any Mail:* modules. Provided that the Emails do not have the "From: " line in the subjects, the following should work fine.

Yes, it did, thanks, and I was surprised at how out of date the distribution list is. Considering the mail boxes are more than 100Mb, perl was very quick to do the job, less than 30 seconds I'd say. No doubt it will take marginally longer to look at all the records (rather than just the "From" lines); I'd need to do this because sometimes people advise of new addresses in the body portion. I put it in a sub as you suggested. Your interim solution is ideal for my purposes, and helped me learn how to parse through files, looking for specifics (I find the Windows 'find' quite frustrating, as it won't look for multiple strings).

Thanks,

Peter