I wonder what would be the recommended module[s] to extract the body from some incoming mail messages.

The 'Perl Cookbook' sec. edition recommends MIME::Parser for getting the attachments; however, I'm interested actually _only_ in the body of the main part, not caring about attachments.

So I thought about using good old Mail::Internet. Out of curiosity, I took a look on Email::Simple and MIME::Parser. Finding them potential interesting too, I went a step further, trying to benchmark them on a simple mail sample.

Which one would be the winner, what are your bets...?

Here the - at least for me - VERY surprising results:

                Rate   mime_parser  email_simple mail_internet
mime_parser   39.9/s            --          -89%          -99%
email_simple   355/s          788%            --          -91%
mail_internet 3846/s         9531%          985%
[download]

And this is the code used:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw( :all );

use Mail::Internet;
use Email::Simple;
use MIME::Parser;

my @message;
   push (@message, $_) while <>;

my $message = join( '', @message );

cmpthese( 1000, { 'mail_internet' => \&_mail_internet,
                  'email_simple'  => \&_email_simple,
                  'mime_parser'   => \&_mime_parser,
                 }
         );
exit 0;

sub _mail_internet {
    my $mail_internet = Mail::Internet->new( \@message );

    my $body = join( '', @{ $mail_internet->body } );
}

sub _email_simple {
    my $email_simple = Email::Simple->new($message);

    my $body = $email_simple->body;
}

sub _mime_parser {
    my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
    my $entity = $parser->parse_data($message);

    my $body_handle = $entity->bodyhandle;
    my $body = $body_handle->as_string
}
[download]

The clear winner seems to be MIME::Parser - despite the fact that I'd have bet on Email::Simple before seeing the numbers.

So - what modules/ways to parse mail messages do other perlers use ?
Am I alone in being surprized by the above benchmarking results ?