One of my favorite IO:: modules is IO::All which wraps up a bunch of different IO operations into a surprisingly easy to use module.

One of these operations allows you to read the file backwards (using File::ReadBackwards): 
# not tested of course
my @message;
my $io = io('mail_file')->backwards->chomp;

while (my $line = $io->getline) {
  unshift @message, $line;
  last if($line =~ m/$message_start_pattern/); 
}
# @message now contains all lines of the 
# last message in correct order
for(@message){
   last if($_ eq "Content-Type: text/html;");
   print "$_\n";
}

[download]
You of course could use File::ReadBackwards by itself

--b

In reply to Re: Extracting the last desired block of text from a server eMail file by bpphillips
in thread Extracting the last desired block of text from a server eMail file by hackermike

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