You wonder what this has to do with Perl - well, the point is that I'm looking for a mail client that is powerful enough to be scripted in Perl. I want it to launch small Perl scripts after fetching mail or on my command, and I want them to manipulate what was downloaded so that I can play nice tricks with it.

One thing you must set out of your mind is that e-mail is simple. To anyone: handling e-mail correctly is a complicated tasks!! Nested multiparts, encodings, unicode... even correctly parsing a mail header containing addresses requires a few hundred lines of Perl. Of course, the sloppy job only needs one.

You have a choice between various sets of modules to script e-mail. For instance the MIME::Entity group, the Mail::Audit stuff, and my MailBox suite. They are all automated e-mail processors, not readers. IMO, the first two are easier to learn, because they are smaller, but leave more of the complications to the programmer. MailBox contains things like read(), forward(), bounce(), build(), rebuild(), and send() in one integrate library.

Nick Ing-Simmons has made tkmail, which is a mail reader, but I couldn't find it. There is a Mail::Procmail. In the near future, I will release a Mail::Box::Procmail, with a fully Perl-based configuration.

In reply to Re: Mail Clients and Perl by markov
in thread Mail Clients and Perl by l3nz

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