xf86 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to write a a perl program to login to a pop3 server and do a RETR for my messages and return each individual message into a file. Example..Message 1 would go in the file message1, message 2 would go in the file message2,etc...What I have working so far is to authenticate, get the number of messages I have and that's it. I have no clue how to return the messages to me properly...here is my code.. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use IO::Socket;
use strict;

my $EOL = "\015\012";
my $BLANK = $EOL x 1;

my $username = "brice";
my $password = "mypassword";
my $count = 0;
my @mailstat;

my $remote = IO::Socket::INET->new(
             Proto    => "tcp",
             PeerAddr => "localhost",
             PeerPort => "pop3(110)",
             )
   or die "cannot connect to daytime port at localhost";

$remote->autoflush(1);

print $remote "USER $username" . $BLANK;
print $remote "PASS $password" . $BLANK;
print $remote "QUIT" . $BLANK;

while ( <$remote> ) {
  if (/lock busy/) {
    die "Session already in use!\n";
  }
  if (/OK $username has/) {
    @mailstat = split(/ /);
  }
}

if ($mailstat[3] eq "0") {
    print "You have no messages.\n";
  }

[download]
The thing that I have figured out as a start to getting the messages would be... 
for ($count = $mailstat[3]; $count > 0; $count--) {
  print $remote "RETR $count" . $BLANK;
  #then do something with the data here. ????
}

[download]
I would appriciate any help. Thanks to all the monks. Ben Rice

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Getmail perl script
by TheoPetersen (Priest) on Apr 07, 2001 at 00:21 UTC
    I replaced your code with this loop cobbled from the example in Mail::POP3Client: 
    use Mail::POP3Client;
$pop = new Mail::POP3Client( USER     => $username,
                             PASSWORD => $password,
                             HOST     => "localhost" );
for( $i = 1; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++ ) {
  open(MESSAGE, ">message$i") or die "Can't open message file";
  print MESSAGE, $pop->Body;
  close MESSAGE;
}
$pop->Close();

    [download]
    I haven't tested it, but I bet you can get this working sooner than your version.

    ..Theo

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Getmail perl script
by suaveant (Parson) on Apr 07, 2001 at 00:09 UTC
    Out of curiosity, why aren't you just using an existing module?

    Update: Out of further curiosity, why did I get voted down for nicely asking a simple question?
                    - Ant

[reply]
      Probably because you didn't suggest a module. If you asked me 'how do I buy a car?' would 'shouldn't you be looking for a car dealer?' be an appropriate answer? Don't answer a question with a question.

      Celebrate Intellectual Diversity

[reply]
        Search.cpan.org is a great place to look for modules... I thought that since you had done so much you had probably already looked into modules for pop3 and found them lacking.
                        - Ant
[reply]
Re: Getmail perl script
by extremely (Priest) on Apr 07, 2001 at 00:45 UTC
    I'm with sauveant on this one. Why not use Mail::POPClient or Net::POP3? And you surely should look at one of them for clues on handling POP3 protocol stuff.

    A POP3 box is supposed to return a "UIDL" Unique IDentifier for each message. You could use that as part of the filename. You really want Net::POP3.

    --
    $you = new YOU;
    honk() if $you->love(perl)

[reply]
      I agree with both extremely and sauveant. Use a module. It'll save you alot of time and has the benefit of (probably) a good bit of testing.

      What I want to know is thats the difference between them. I looked over the docs and they both look roughly the same (more stuff in Mail::POPClient). I'm using Mail::POPClient in my "yet another mail client" (trust me it's different :)), but am interested to hear of any pros/cons of each.

      xf86, To handle attachements and the like, look into MIME-tools

[reply]
        I'm not sure there are any hard and fast rules, but for both the POP and IMAP sets (which have Net:: and Mail:: modules) I'd use the Mail:: versions for a client and the Net:: versions for a biffer or other status check. The Net:: versions are light(er) weight and have the methods for talking to the server; good candidates for subclassing if you wanted to do more yourself.
[reply]

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