Monks,

I'm having trouble with both Net::POP3 and Mail::POP3Client.

I think I'm doing everything "right" - see code at bottom. However...

With Net::POP3 I get strange errors in $!. As far as I could tell from available online docs, that's where it's putting error messages. For connection errors it seems fine, but on authentication errors I get weirdness: for example, when the POP3 server returns the error "-ERR Username/Password Mismatch perhaps foo@yourdomain.com ?" I get "Bad file descriptor" in $!.

I really need to capture this info.

Does anyone know a better/more reliable way to access the *actual* error return value from the POP3 server in Net::POP3?

Hoping it would be easier with Mail::POP3Client, which at least has Message(), I tried that... and found that I get a "Broken pipe" error if I try to connect to my *local* POP3 server, while it works fine if the server is remote.

I can work around that, since in this case I'm only checking external servers, but it seems very inelegant... and who knows, maybe I've even found a bug in Mail::POP3Client ;-)

Any pointers are much appreciated. For now I'm going to just have to use a workaround. :-(

(I'm running Perl 5.6.1 on RedHat7.2, and CPAN-installed these modules a few days ago.)

CODE SAMPLES:

Mail::POP3Client: 

# POP3Client dies with "Broken pipe" and nothing else.
#  (works fine with external server)
use strict;
use Mail::POP3Client;

my $pop3 = new Mail::POP3Client( HOST  => "localhost" );
$pop3->User( "somebody" );
$pop3->Pass( "doublesecret" );
$pop3->Connect() || die "failed: " . $pop3->Message() . "\n";
$pop3->Close();

[download]

Net::POP3: 

# Host is valid, user/pass are not.
use strict;
use Net::POP3;

my $host = 'biztos.com'; # valid POP3 host, feel free to test against 
+it.
my $user = 'foobar';     # nonexistent user
my $pass = 'badpass';    # dummy password
my $pop3 = Net::POP3->new($host,Timeout => 30,Debug => 1);
die "connect failed: $!\n" unless $pop3; # this works fine.
# try apop first:
my $apop_messages = $pop3->apop($user,$pass);
if ($apop_messages) {
    $pop3->quit();
    print "apop ok.\n";
}
else {
    print "apop didn't work, trying login ($!)\n";
    # the above $! is "No such file or directory"
    # ...and debug didn't show anything, so I'm assuming
    # apop() just skipped it due to presumed incompatibility.
    # on my localhost it shows the apop transaction.
    my $pop_message = $pop3->login($user,$pass);
    if ($pop_message) {
        $pop3->quit();
        print "login ok.\n";
    }
    else {
        $pop3->quit();
        die "login failed: $!\n";
        # the above $! is "Bad file descriptor" but the
        # POP3 server said:
        # "-ERR Username/Password Mismatch perhaps foobar@yourdomain.c
+om ?"
    }
}

[download]

In reply to Net::POP3 and Mail::POP3Client Weirdness - argh! by frostman

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