Dear Monks,

I have written a Perl program to that receives and forwards email to a fax number specified in the subject line. This is executed via /etc/aliases on a particular userid. The install looks like this:

fax: "| /usr/local/bin/faxout.pl"
[download]

The email has a TIFF attachment, which is extracted, decoded from base64 back to TIFF, and faxed to the number on the subject line. I am not a MIME expert and have used my own test data to debug what to do. I may be missing some big issues that will arrive shortly after implementation.

My code is running on Perl 5.8 under RedHat Linux 8. I seek advice on the Perl code itself, and what MIME issues that I didn't code for.

Here is the code. Thanks in advance!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# /usr/local/bin/faxout.pl [debug]
#
# Script to parse email and send as a fax.   Looks to the Subject: lin
+e
# for /name= /fax= information.  The fax number extracted is used to c
+all
# /usr/bin/sendfax with the correct number to dial.
# The fax attachment is extracted and decoded from base64 back to tiff
# before being sent to sendfax.
#
# Parameters:
#   debug  - set debug on
#

use strict;
local (*MAIL);
my ($name,$faxno,$appno);
my ($cboundary,$cencode);

# set the debug parm.
my $DEBUG = (shift @ARGV || 0);


while (my $line := <>) { # read each line of the email

  # Extract the Subject: line information
  if ($line =~ /^Subject:/) {
    print "\n$line" if $DEBUG;
    ($name,$faxno,$appno) = $line =~ /\/name=(.*)\/fax=(.*)\/app#=(.*)
+$/;
    print "$name\n$faxno\n$appno\n" if $DEBUG;
    }

  # Extract the boundary information
  if ($line =~ /^ boundary=/) {
    print "\n$line" if $DEBUG;
    ($cboundary) = $line =~ /"(.*)"/;
    print "$cboundary\n" if $DEBUG;
    }

  # verify the attachment's encoding is base64
  if ($line =~ /^Content-transfer-encoding:/) {
    print "\n$line" if $DEBUG;
    ($cencode) = $line =~ / (.*)$/;
    print "$cencode\n" if $DEBUG;
    next if ($cencode ne "base64");

    # ready to read and decode the encoded attachment
    #
    # setup a pipe to decode the attachment and write the data to temp
+.
    open MAIL, "| /usr/bin/uudecode -o /var/tmp/uu.$$";
    print MAIL "\nbegin-base64 644 tmp\n";  # necessary begin marker

    while (<>) {
      next if /^$/;          # skip blank lines.
      next if /$cboundary/;  # skip boundary lines.
      print MAIL;
      }

    print MAIL "====\n";     # necessary end marker
    close MAIL;
    }
  }

# submit the fax and remove the temp file.
my @args = ("/usr/bin/sendfax", "-mnd", "$name\@$faxno", "/var/tmp/uu.
+$$");
system @args;
unlink "/var/tmp/uu.$$";
[download]

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