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

Dearest Monks, i have setup a gmail account to receive google alerts. i wrote the script below to dump the header and body of any email received by this account into a TXT file. my problem is this - when the body of the email is dumped into the TXT file i only get the resulting text and not the underlying HTML code. for example, what i want in the TXT file is: 
<a href="http://www.blahblah.com/article.html">The Article Link</a>

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Not: 
The Article Link

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my code is below. any thoughts? please note, the script below is only designed for capturing the header / body of a single email. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Mail::POP3Client;

my $user = 'blahblahblah';
my $pass = 'blahblahblah';

my $pop = new Mail::POP3Client(
    USER     => $user,
    PASSWORD => $pass,
    HOST     => "pop.gmail.com",
    PORT     => 995,
    USESSL   => 'true',
);

my $count = $pop->Count();
if ($count < 0) {
    print $pop->Message();
} elsif ($count == 0) {
    print "no messages\n";
} else {    
    for my $i (1 .. $count) {    
        open(STDOUT, ">my_txt_output.txt");
        my $fh = new IO::Handle();
        $fh->fdopen( fileno( STDOUT ), "w" );
        $pop->HeadAndBodyToFile( $fh, $i );
        close STDOUT;
    }
}
$pop->Close();

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many thanks...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How can I capture HTML code from my POP3 email body
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 14, 2008 at 19:15 UTC

    I don't think Mail::POP3Client does any such translation. It dumps to the file exactly what it receives from the server.

    By the way, what's this crazyness? 

            open(STDOUT, ">my_txt_output.txt");
        my $fh = new IO::Handle();
        $fh->fdopen( fileno( STDOUT ), "w" );
        $pop->HeadAndBodyToFile( $fh, $i );
        close STDOUT;

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    You should use 

            open(my $fh, '>', 'my_txt_output.txt')
            or die("Can't create my_txt_output.txt: $!\n");
        $pop->HeadAndBodyToFile( $fh, $i );

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[d/l]
[select]
      good stuff -- many thanks for the clean up. i'm new to perl and unfortunately have buckets of crazyness in my code...

      but back to my original problem. i did some searching and found modules for sending HTML mail (such as HTML::Mail), but didn't find anything for retrieving HTML mail. i'm not sure but i believe the gmail servers do preserve the 'google alerts' messages in HTML. any thoughts out there about how to retrieve the HTML mail using perl? thanks again.

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Re: How can I capture HTML code from my POP3 email body
by perreal (Monk) on Oct 14, 2008 at 22:53 UTC
    I studied checkgmail code for a similar project and it worked for me. I think you can derive a solution from checkgmail.
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