I get the same, unhelpful (does not help me get the desired mappings above), results regardless of whether I use:

    use MIME::Words qw(:all);

    my $rawSub = $head->get( 'subject' );
    
    my $mailSubject = decode_mimewords( $rawSub );
[download]

    use MIME::WordDecoder;

    my $wd = supported MIME::WordDecoder "US-ASCII";

    ### Decode a MIME string (e.g., into Latin1) via the default decod
+er:
    my $str = $wd->decode( $rawSub );
    
    print $str, "\n";
[download]

For some reason that I am unable to understand, the following fails completely (the output shows me the unknown character designator '_' for any character!):

    use MIME::WordDecoder;

    my $wd = new MIME::WordDecoder::US_ASCII;
    $wd->unknown( '_' ); # What to translate unknown characters to
    $wd->collapse( 1 ); # Collapse runs of unknown characters to a sin
+gle unknown
    
    print $wd->decode( $rawSub ), "\n";
[download]

Here is some code:

    use Date::Manip;
    Date_Init( "ConvTZ=IGNORE", "TZ=GMT" ); # We don't want time conve
+rsions happening. GMailBackup ignores timezone conformance and keeps 
+timestamps as they were
    
    # If using Date::Transform, you can use '%g' that is short for %a,
+ %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z - Fri, 28 Apr 1995 17:23:15 EDT; For eg : Sat, 
+9 Feb 2008 17:04:08 -0330
    $mailDate = UnixDate( $mailDate , '%Y_%m_%Q-%H%M%S' ); # 2008_02_2
+0080209-170408
[download]

For this example, consider the date string:

Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:04:08 -0380

The timezone in the string is clearly bogus (minutes value > 60); yet this happens in "real life".

As evident from the code, I don't need the timezone information anyways. So how do I "lop it off" (is it recommended?) reliably?

I would rather have someone tell me a magic flag that I am unaware of that makes the UnixDate ignore the timezone as "chopping it off" promises to complicate life even more (time zones can be in different formats. Eg : EET, -330, +710, etc)