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

Hi I'm looking for a way to access embedded email. That is, I have an email with another email as attachment, I need to open that embedded email to find out emailaddess in its content by regular expression. I found some code which can get attached file and save it to somewhere. But that's not what I need because my attachment is an email, not text/word or excel file. It'll be highly appreciated if somebody who has this kind of knowledge/experience can tell me which module I should use and where to find some example code.

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Re: Perl to open embedded email?
by halfcountplus (Hermit) on Oct 07, 2009 at 20:28 UTC
    If you use an mbox style mailbox (most people do) you can parse it in all kinds of crazy ways (eg, pull all images, etc) with Mail::Box::Manager. Actually that may work with any kind of mailbox.

    Here's a simple program to start you off: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Mail::Box::Manager;

my $mgr = new Mail::Box::Manager;
my $box = $mgr->open(folder=>"/you/mail/somebox");

my $c = 0;
while (my $msg = $box->message($c)) {
    my @sender = $msg->from;
    my $id = $msg->messageId;
    print "\n$id\n$sender[0][0]\n";
    $c++;
}

    [download]
    That will print the message id number and sender for each message. To deal with attachments, you want to look into $msg->parts. Note that a "folder" here is actually a single file.
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Re: Perl to open embedded email?
by zwon (Abbot) on Oct 07, 2009 at 19:53 UTC
    I found some code which can get attached file and save it to somewhere. But that's not what I need

    You can get attached email in the same way as you getting attached file, and then parse it as usual email message.

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      zwon: Thanks for your reply. But how to parse that embedded email. For example, in following code usiong Win32::OLE, it seems I can get that email first (1st line), but then it doesn't work when I try to get the email body. my $attach = $folder->Items->Item($i)->Attachments(); # this line works my $attachemailbody= $folder->Items->Item($i)->Attachments()->Body; # this line doesn't
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        I didn't expect that you're using OLE. I'm a GNU/Linux user, so can't help you much with OLE, but perhaps you can get the message in some more digestible form and use something like Email::MIME to parse it. Can you show the output of: 

        my $attach = $folder->Items->Item($i)->Attachments();
use Data::Dumper;
warn Dumper $attach;

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