I need to parse an email message and pull its various parts apart. Is
there some not-so-difficult way to do it? Corriel looks like it would be
just the thing, unfortunately it won't run on Windows. The Mail:: and
Email:: modules seem very complicated when all I want to do is feed it a
complete message and get at the various pieces [body, attachments, etc] and
the headers [from, date, etc]. Is there a _simple_ package that'll do
that? If not, are there tutorials or the like for Mail:: and/or Email::?
They seem to be much more focused on managing actual mailboxes {Mail::} and
*composing* emails [Email::] and give pretty short shrift [to my struggling
with the man pages] to just *parsing* an email. Thanks!

/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--

Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> writes:
> I need to parse an email message and pull its various parts apart. Is
> there some not-so-difficult way to do it? Corriel looks like it would be
> just the thing, unfortunately it won't run on Windows. The Mail:: and
> Email:: modules seem very complicated when all I want to do is feed it a
> complete message and get at the various pieces [body, attachments, etc] and
> the headers [from, date, etc]. Is there a _simple_ package that'll do
> that? If not, are there tutorials or the like for Mail:: and/or Email::?
> They seem to be much more focused on managing actual mailboxes {Mail::} and
> *composing* emails [Email::] and give pretty short shrift [to my struggling
> with the man pages] to just *parsing* an email. Thanks!

There is no simple way to parse an e-mail message: That's literally the
most complicated grammar I ever wrote a parser for.

On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 18:37:26 -0500, Bernie Cosell wrote:

> Is there a _simple_ package that'll do that? If not, are there
> tutorials or the like for Mail:: and/or Email::?

I use Email::MIME. How "simple" it is depends on your point of view but,
as someone else has already observed, MIME email has a complicated
structure (e.g. separate parts within one message are themselves
Email::MIME structures), and you're not going to get a /simple/ piece of
code that understands that.

However, if you pass the text of a single message to Email::MIME, the
object will then give you a "header_pairs" method, which will give you a
great deal of what you need. And there's a "body" method which will give
you the body, surprisingly.

If you want to send me a mail (address is valid) I can let you have great
wodges of code that does this stuff; maybe reading through it and taking
out the bits you don't need might help you. It's object-oriented so you
might even be able to use the packages.

--
Henry Law n e w s @ l a w s h o u s e . o r g
Manchester, England

* Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com>:
> I need to parse an email message and pull its various parts apart. Is
> there some not-so-difficult way to do it? Corriel looks like it would be

There is no really simple way because mail headers and MIME are not
simple. A MIME message may be an arbitrarily complex tree of parts,
parts may be items of a whole lot of media types such as text, html,
images, videos, pdf etc. Then there is the further complexity of
"multipart/alternative", where you will have to decide by some
heuristic which of the alternatives you want to extract or display.

I'd recommend Email::MIME, maybe that qualifies as "not-so-difficult".

"arbitrarily complex tree" is a hint that a recursive approach should
be used.

This skeleton passes the mail message in $message to Email::MIME for
parsing. The "showparts" method then displays a summary of each direct
subpart and calls itself recursively for that subpart. It uses
Email::MIME::ContentType to parse the "Content-Type" headers, which may
be quite complex, too.

use Email::MIME;
use Email::MIME::ContentType;

my $email = Email::MIME->new($message);
sub showparts;
sub showparts {
my $item = shift;
my $indent = shift;
my $i = 1;
for my $part ($item->subparts) {
my $ct = parse_content_type($part->content_type);
my $len = length $part->body;
print "part$indent $i: $ct->{type}/$ct->{subtype}, $len bytes\n";
showparts $part, "$indent $i";
$i++;
}
}
showparts $email, "";

If you are, for example, just interested in all pdf attachments,
might be enough to filter out the parts with a Content-Type of
application/pdf or application/x-pdf.

- Andi

Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> wrote:

} I need to parse an email message and pull its various parts apart. Is
} there some not-so-difficult way to do it?

Wow -- thanks for all the info. I knew MIME messages were messy but I
didn't really realize just *how* messy. I think I'll need to more
fine-tune exactly what I want from the message and then focus on
finding/extracting just that.

Thanks! /Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--