You're probably looking for something that will read the 'mbox' format -- Mail::MboxParser will do it. Or you can probably give Mail::Folder a shot, as it has an mbox driver. Here's a few more that came up when searching CPAN for 'mbox':
I strongly recommend you check out each of those, and decide which one has the features you need while being easiest to use.
--Stevie-O
$"=$,,$_=q>|\p4<6 8p<M/_|<('=>
.q>.<4-KI<l|2$<6%s!<qn#F<>;$,
.=pack'N*',"@{[unpack'C*',$_]
}"for split/</;$_=$,,y[A-Z a-z]
{}cd;print lc
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[d/l] |
Unix mailboxes are flat files. Each message starts with the pattern:
/^From /
Immediately following the From_ are the message headers, followed by a blank line, followed by the body of the message. The message ends at the next From_ or at EOF.
As Stevie-O suggests, you'll probably want to use a mail parsing module for this. It's not that hard to write your own, but almost nobody gets it right the first time, and it's easier to just use one of the modules
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[d/l] |
Lines in the messages matching /^From / should be escaped (with a dash), but it's usually better to pay attention to the Content-Length and Content-Lines headers, provided they exist.
Please note that rolling your own can cause some unexpected damage, and that it's been done already (usually pretty well (and many times over)), and made available on the CPAN (see the previous posts).
Good luck!
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[d/l]
[select] |
++ Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering what the file format actually was for mbox. Makes a lot of sense. Cheers!
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Firstly, have you looked on cpan (http://search.cpan.org/search?query=mail&mode=module)? There are many mail modules, you may find something useful there.
Secondly, mail, mailx and sendmail are very different beasts. The first two are mail clients, they read whats in your mailbox and can send mail to the MTA (mail transfer agent). Sendmail is a SMTP server (I won't go into why it shouldn't be used). SMTP - simple mail transfer protocol. The SMTP server is the thing that does the work, delivering mail so your client can read it.
There is shell access to sendmail but it isn't pretty.
You can read/parse mail headers with Perl, C and other languages. For Perl modules see the CPAN link above.
CC
The above is an over simplification of how mail works. | [reply] |
Anonymous Monk writes:
even if you knew of some good books that might help me exploit mail files for business purposes
Here's the best I've found on the topic - it's very good:
Programming Internet Email
What a surprise, it's from O'Reilly. :-)
Good luck!
Peace,
-McD
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