Which mail modules to use?

jdtoronto has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Esteemed monks,

I have a rather large Windows based Perl/Tk application into which I have started building an email client section. The application is a contact manager which needs to be able to send and receive email to/from those people in the contact database.

I started out using Net::SMTP - which has been very succesful (we don't permit anything other than plain text emails with no attachments!), and Net::POP3 / Mail::Header / Mail::Address / Mail::Internet - which has been only partly succesful. Like when folks send us an email with an attachment - such as .vcf files and the like. There seem to be three major choices for how to go about this:

The Classic Mail::Internet approach by Graham Barr.
The Mail::Box Swiss Army knife of email from Mark Overmeer, or
Simon Cozens Email::Simple family of modules from the Perl Email Project.

I really don't know which way to go and I would appreciate any comments and experiences from others here.

jdtoronto

Comment on Which mail modules to use?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Which mail modules to use? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 13, 2005 at 21:27 UTC
I used to use Mail::Box for processing incoming mail and sending outgoing mail, but it's a huge distribution and included a lot of things that I didn't need. The PEP modules are simpler to use, do everything I want, and are slimmer to install. For sending and receiving e-mail, I prefer them now.	[reply]
Re: Which mail modules to use? by Jaap (Curate) on Apr 14, 2005 at 09:55 UTC
What exactly are you looking for? A complete package to handle your incoming mail, fetching it from the POP3 account and decoding the MIME and Base64 encodings and the likes? Or do you want a module for a specific subtask?	[reply]
Re^2: Which mail modules to use? by jdtoronto (Prior) on Apr 14, 2005 at 23:30 UTC
I need to fetch from the POP3 server, extract from address and match with my database, where there is a match I need to parse the email and add it to the database. Attachments need to be handled sanely, maybe by putting them into a 'folder' and adding a pointer into the database record. I would prefer to deal only with plain text, but it seems that very few people understand what that is any more! jdtoronto	[reply]