Saving attachments from email files

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

I need to save attachments from emails using Mail::POP3Client. I need to decode base64 files and then save, and other attachments just save them as is. Is there something that I haven't found that does this better than doing it myself? The text file contains the headers for the email, the body of the email, and then for each attachment a small header like these (2 attachments):

--Apple-Mail-16--694122637
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/pdf;
        x-unix-mode=0644;
        name="bus-schedule.pdf"
Content-Disposition: inline;
        filename=some-file.pdf
(then base64 code here)

--Apple-Mail-18--693549197
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
        x-mac-type=2A2A2A2A;
        x-unix-mode=0644;
        x-mac-creator=48647261;
        name="somefilename"
Content-Disposition: attachment;
        filename=somefilename
(then the file is here)
[download]

Here is my POP3Client script that right now returns the subject and from, and saves the whole email as a file.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Mail::POP3Client;
use MIME::Parser;
my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client( USER     => "email\@mydomain.com",
                               PASSWORD => "mypassword",
                               HOST     => "mail.mydomain.com" );
my $i;
for( $i = 111; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++ ) {
  foreach( $pop->Head( $i ) ) {
    /^(From|Subject):\s+/i && print $_, "\n";
my $dir = '/some/folder/somewhere/attachments';

     my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
     my $io = new IO::File;
     if ($io->open( "> $dir/raw-message.$i")) {
       $pop->HeadAndBodyToFile( $io, $i );
       $io->close;
       print "Parsing $dir/raw-message.$i...\n";
       $parser->parse( IO::File->new( "$dir/raw-message.$i") );
     }


  }
}
$pop->Close();
[download]

Can anyone advise? I need to be able to handle multiple files too, and pretty much any type of attachment.

Thanks in advance!

-Michael Jensen
michael@inblosam.com

Comment on Saving attachments from email files Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Saving attachments from email files by dave0 (Friar) on May 02, 2005 at 17:26 UTC
You're part-way there with MIME::Parser, but you're not actually using the return value of ->parse() for some reason. Try something like this as a starting point: `my $entity = $parser->parse( IO::File->new( "$dir/raw-message.$i") ); foreach my $part ($entity->parts()) { # Look at $part (a MIME::Entity object) and determine what to do +with it }` [download] MIME::Parser::parse() will return a top-level MIME::Entity object for the message. If it's a multipart message, you can get the separate MIME::Entity objects for each subpart by iterating over $entity->parts(). Then in that foreach loop, you can examine the content-type or filename of each part and determine what you want to do with it.	[reply] [d/l]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re: Saving attachments from email files
by dave0 (Friar) on May 02, 2005 at 17:26 UTC

my $entity = $parser->parse( IO::File->new( "$dir/raw-message.$i") );
foreach my $part ($entity->parts()) {
     # Look at $part (a MIME::Entity object) and determine what to do 
+with it
}
[download]

MIME::Parser::parse() will return a top-level MIME::Entity object for the message. If it's a multipart message, you can get the separate MIME::Entity objects for each subpart by iterating over $entity->parts().

Then in that foreach loop, you can examine the content-type or filename of each part and determine what you want to do with it.

[reply]
[d/l]