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

Dear Monks,

What would be the best Perl module to use to read e-mails from a POP3 account?

I am trying to write a Perl script that accesses a POP3 e-mail box and prints out the bodies all of the e-mails that it sees. Ideally I would also like to be able to know certain things about each e-mail such as who the e-mail is from, to, subject line, date, etc.

I am only concerned with the text/plain or text/html portions of the e-mails. I do not need to parse or retrieve e-mail attachments. Also, if the e-mail contains both a text/plain and text/html portion, I would like to be able to access the text/html portion with the HTML tags intact and without all of the encoded e-mail headers.

So far this is what I have: 

use Mail::Box::POP3;
$url = "pop3://username:password\@server.address.com";
$pop = Mail::Box::POP3->new($url);

[download]

What do I write next? How do I start looping through the e-mails? Is this even the correct module to use?

Thanks so much for all of your help.

UPDATE!! a few minutes later!

I was able to access and loop through e-mails in the POP3 account with this simple code: 

use Mail::Box::Manager;
$mgr    = Mail::Box::Manager->new;
$pop = $mgr->open(type => 'pop3',
            username => 'my@email.address',
            password => 'mypasswordxxxxx',
            server_name => 'my.mail.server');

foreach $msg ($pop->messages) 
{
    $content_type = $msg->contentType;
    $from_address = $msg->sender->address;    
    $body = $msg->decoded;
}

[download]

Now, the question is, how do I extract the HTML portion of the body of the e-mail from the rest of the body? For example, here is what the body looks like in its current form: 

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
 
------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0
Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
 
From: sender@email.address
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:28 PM
To: test@email.address
Subject: This is the subject 
 
This is the body. 
 
------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0
Content-Type: text/html;
    charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
 
<html>
<head>
<body>

This is the body.
 
</body> 
</html>
------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0--

[download]

So my question is, how do I extract only the part between the <html> and </html> tags?

Thanks so much.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: best module to read e-mail from a POP3 account
by gmargo (Hermit) on Dec 21, 2009 at 20:46 UTC

    In the previous recent thread parsing and printing e-mail, keszler suggested the Email::MIME module.

    Here's a test program that uses Email::MIME to pull apart a full message. You should be able to figure out how to isolate just the parts you want. 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

use Email::MIME;

my $body = join("",(<DATA>));
my $email = Email::MIME->new($body);
print "===== Top Header =====\n";
print "From: ".($email->header("From"))."\n";
print "Date: ".($email->header("Date"))."\n";
print "Subject: ".($email->header("Subject"))."\n";
print "\n===== Top Body =====\n";
print "".($email->body())."\n";
my @parts = $email->parts();
print "There are ".@parts." parts in this message.\n";
my $p = 0;
foreach my $part (@parts)
{
    $p++;
    print "\n===== Part $p Header =====\n";
    print "Content-Type: ".($part->header("Content-Type"))."\n";
    print "Content-Transfer-Encoding: ".($part->header("Content-Transf
+er-Encoding"))."\n";
    print "\n===== Part $p Body =====\n";
    print "".($part->body())."\n";
}


__DATA__
From: homer@simpson.net
To: marge@simpson.net
Subject: Bart and Lisa
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:17:23 -0700
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
    boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0"
Mime-Version: 1.0

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0
Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

From: sender@email.address
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:28 PM
To: test@email.address
Subject: This is the subject 

This is the body. 

------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0
Content-Type: text/html;
    charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<html>
<head>
<body>

This is the body.

</body> 
</html>

------=_NextPart_000_0009_01CA7F30.7F3A37C0--

    [download]

    Output from the program: 

    ===== Top Header =====
From: homer@simpson.net
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:17:23 -0700
Subject: Bart and Lisa

===== Top Body =====
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


There are 2 parts in this message.

===== Part 1 Header =====
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

===== Part 1 Body =====
From: sender@email.address
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:28 PM
To: test@email.address
Subject: This is the subject 

This is the body. 



===== Part 2 Header =====
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

===== Part 2 Body =====
<html>
<head>
<body>

This is the body.

</body>
</html>

    [download]
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Re: best module to read e-mail from a POP3 account
by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 22, 2009 at 13:40 UTC
[reply]

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