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.