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

Are there are complete email reading packages writting in perl? (Would know which part of body in MIME messages is text, would strip HTML from messages with no plaintext segment, etc.) I know about Mime-tools and such, but I'm looking for a more completed reader I can't seem to find anything.. but I'd be pretty surprised if there actually wasn't anything thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: email/MIME reader?
by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Jan 08, 2001 at 04:11 UTC
    Not to my knowledge, but a script that would use MIME::Tools (specifically, MIME::Parser) to parse an inbound "message", figure out if it's a multipart/alternative message, and drop the HTML component or return the text component, save attachments, whatever, probably wouldn't be all that hard to write.

    Perl has the modules to do MIME processing. The hard part would be writing the application and getting the features implemented.

    If you're looking to write one of these, note that there are already a billion e-mail clients out there, many done as a "this is my first real program" type of experiments/projects. If that's the direction you're going in, go for it.

    These modules seem to be more useful (to me at least) in doing automatic processing of incoming mail, for example, stripping out (or scanning, whatever), say, HTML components to messages, or certain types of file attachments, etc.

Re: email/MIME reader?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 08, 2001 at 10:24 UTC
    CSCMail runs on Unix, uses GTK, and is written in Perl.

    I haven't tried it, but it does have MIME support and can use a DBI-capable database for storage.

Re: email/MIME reader?
by t0mas (Priest) on Jan 08, 2001 at 12:06 UTC
    Have a look at CyberSpace Cowboy Mail. It is written in Perl using the GTK toolkit and the gnome-perl bindings. Kind of cool, /me thinks...

    /brother t0mas
Re: email/MIME reader?
by kschwab (Vicar) on Jan 08, 2001 at 04:17 UTC
    My reply has little to do with perl, but it sounds like perhaps you are looking for a nice text-mode email client that is MIME aware.

    You may like mutt. It isn't done in perl, doesn't have a perl interface, but AFAIK, it does most of what you are asking.