Hello Monks, I am a newbie in Perl and Linux (Mandrake 9.0 to be exact) and have been set the challenge of writing a script to attach an image to an e-mail message, and then extract the image from message at the other end and store in the 
/home/me/webtest/mail/attachments/
folder. simplemail.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use MIME::Entity;

#######################
#
#  Define the varibles for the test
#
########################

$toAddress ='me@localhost';
$fromAddress ='me@localhost';
$Subject ="Some Random Subject";
$message = ["<B>This is a test message</B> that <i>witters</i> on abou
+t some random stuff<br>\n",
        "Why?  I dunno, i guess it just feels like doing so<br>\n",
        "Anyway it's doing no harm is it?<br>\n",
        "<a href=\"http://www.someurl.com\">Somewebsite</a>"];

$aFileName = "someimage.gif";
$aType = "image/gif";
$aEncoding = "-SUGGEST";

###############################
#
# The Donkey Work Part.....
#
################################

## Create the top-level, and set up the mail headers:
    $top = MIME::Entity->build(Type     => "text/html",
                               From     => $fromAddress,
                               To       => $toAddress,
                               Subject  => $Subject,
                   Data    => $message);

## for plaine text e-mail change Type to "text/plain",


# Attach a Signature....
    $top->attach(Path=>"signature.txt",
            Disposition => "inline",
        Encoding => "8bit");

# Attach the Image....
    $top->attach(Path        => $aFileName,
                 Type        => $aType,
                 Encoding    => $aEncoding,
         Disposition => "attachment");

# Send the message
    open (MAIL,"|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi");
    $top->print(\*MAIL);
    close MAIL;

[download]
This above code covers part one adaquetly and displays correctly in Evolution(Mandrake 9) and OE(Win98). Looking round the perlmonks site i found this strip.pl 
use MIME::Parser;

sub read_email {
  my $dir = "/home/me/webtest/mail/attachments";
  my $url = "http://127.0.0.1/mail/attachments";

  my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
  $parser->output_dir($dir);
  my $entity = $parser->read(\*STDIN) || die "couldn't parse MIME stre
+am";
  my $head = $entity->head;
  my $content = $head->as_string . "\n";

  my @parts = $entity->parts;
  my $body = $entity->bodyhandle;

  $content .= $body->as_string if defined $body;
  my $part;
  for $part (@parts) {
    my $path = ($part->bodyhandle) ? $part->bodyhandle->path : undef;
    if ($path =~ /msg-\d+.*\.doc/) {
      open(IN, $path) || warn "Couldn't open $path\n";
      local $/ = undef;
      $content .= <IN> . "\n";
      close IN;
      unlink ($path) || warn "Couldn't unlink $path\n";       
    }   
    else {
      my $file = $path;
      $file =~ s/$dir//o;
      $content .= "\n--\nSaved attachment: $url$file\n--\n"; }
    }

return $content;
}

[download]
which from what I could asertain should do the job. I guess it needs to be called from Konsole with the following 
perl strip.pl

[download]
It run's okay with no error messages, however nothing happens, i am confused. I have managed to install procmail and metamail (after finally sussing out that by csh it meant tcsh for the dependancy) if they would make my life easier. I would only want .gif .png .jpg and .jpeg files extracted.

In reply to Newbie : Extracting Attchments from E-Mail and storing in a directory by kev

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