Rodster001 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have done some searching on CPAN but I am not finding a good module for parsing incoming mail into its parts. I thought Email::Simple with Email::MIME would do the trick but the body of a mail message sent from Outlook gets parsed as "This is a multi-part message in MIME format" (and the documentation states the "body" method will most likely return that, amazingly).

Any recommendations?
Thanks!
Rod

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Parsing Incoming Mail
by Corion (Patriarch) on Dec 30, 2008 at 17:15 UTC

    Have you looked at MIME::Parser? It's quite heavyweight, but it will parse a MIME message into its parts, which seems to be what your message is.

[reply]
      Looking at it now. I also saw this thread about Mail::Message. This is not the first time I have been here, but I am a little surprised how difficult mail handling still is. Many of the modules available on CPAN don't seem to be in a fully developed state (at least the ones I have looked at). It seems the Internet has been around long enought that we would have this part down by now ;) Looking at the reviews on CPAN for Mail::Message and MIME::Parser many are complaining about the overhead of these modules and more than once I have seen people saying they have just resorted to writing their own parser.
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        That's probably a case of the common case vs. technically correct. ~95% of the time, a fairly simple parser will get you all of the parts of an email message. The rest of the time consists of obscure edge-cases, weird nesting rules, and never-seen formats. Much of the time in particular contexts you can get away with ignoring all of that detail and just handling the 'standard' cases.

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Re: Parsing Incoming Mail
by sflitman (Hermit) on Dec 31, 2008 at 06:53 UTC
    MIME::Tools has saved me on many occasions. It isn't hard to use, and the overhead is worth it for handling the vagaries of MIME-formatted emails, especially ones with nested attachments. I process SpamAssassin-filtered mail which can have attached RFC-822 messages which themselves contain attachments. Don't write your own parser, the whole point of CPAN is leverage what the community provides you.

    HTH, SSF

[reply]
      Just to wrap up this thread, I did end up using MIME::Tools and everything is working nicely. It wasn't bad at all once I got into it. I've tested with a few user agents and so for so good. It is a heavyweight but what can I say, email is heavyweight. And yes, I agree with you sflitman, CPAN is a friend which I wholly embrace.
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