This past month I built a little system that might be useful for your reference. I was thinking of doing a writeup since PM helped me to get a start on it.

It continually connects to a mailbox with Net::POP3, scans the subject and sender, downloads email, and strips out and renames photos and text with MIME::Tools. Another perl process uses Win32::OLE to constantly update a MyAlbum slideshow to show the photos that people sent in from their camera-equipped phones.

It keeps track of what was downloaded by saving the Unique ID hash provided by the server, so that you can also download email with Outlook and not lose your place. (You could download to Outlook and erase from the server though).

If you have to look at headers the MIME Head object may be useful anyway also look at the Mail::Head.

Anyway, if what you are really doing is an SMS gateway then Outlook is just going to give you big problems. How about making a separate account for the gateway, or using a procmail (if you are on unix)? By the way there is a bunch of Perl SMS stuff here.

Of course if you only have one account you could download the mail to a local POP server running on your machine with fetchmail or this perl program, then retrieve non-SMS mail using Outlook from the local cache. Then you won't have to worry about email being deleted.

By the way I would certainly like to hear how the SMS part is done since I may have to implement this art project in SMS early next year and there is no SMS in Japan where I live.

Matt R.