When I first learned that sendmail could pipe incoming messages to a program, a number of interesting possibilities occurred to me. One that I'm especially interested in exploring is the idea of stuffing messages from a mailing list into a database, thus giving me ways to search by sender, subject, full-text...

So as a first step, I whopped up a simple script that just prints STDIN to a temp file, so I could see exactly what was coming in and get a handle on how to parse it.

This led to exploration of MIME types, base64 encoding, and various other things.

My question: Is this a reasonable way to be doing this, or would it be easier (from the standpoint of processing the mail) to let the mail flow into a mailbox, and then parse it from there?

One way gives real time processing; the other would obviously have to be a periodic cron job.

I poked around briefly on CPAN, and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of modules that deal with email in one fashion or another. Anybody got favorites?

--Ian

In reply to Handling Incoming Mail by Ian the Terrible

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