MIME encoded attachments

[Keary Suska]

As Vance indicated, extracting MIME parts is fairly straightforward, since
you would just look for the boundary string. The complexities involve
dealing with the different MIME content-types and how to handle them. Not
all MIME parts are attachments, as they could be an HTML version of the
email, as version in a different language, etc. It's been a while since I
have looked at the MIME modules, but I am pretty sure the recent versions
handle almost every encoding/decoding method and can easily extract
different parts. Depending on what the agent is designed to do, you may be
able to ignore many content-types, but beware that not all MTA's properly
conform to the MIME 1.0 standard.

Regards,

Keary Suska
Mgr., Information Technologies
Frequent Flyer Services
http://www.webflyer.com/
mailto: aksuska at webflyer.com
(719) 597-8899 x737
(719) 597-6855 (fax)


> From: Vance Dubberly <vance at coloradosprings.com>
> Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 14:53:29 -0600
> To: Pikes-Peak Perl Mongers <pikes-peak-pm-list at happyfunball.pm.org>
> Subject: Re: MIME encoded attachments
> 
> John,
> Mail attachements are usually uuencoded, sometimes base64,  if you read
> mail using elm or mail or whatever program you'll see attachments are just a
> long series of rows of ascii text actually embedded in the email message.
> What I've done in the past is parse the email looking for the boundaries (
> "Content-Type: multipart/mixed" boundary="some_ugly_string")  pulled out the
> encoded part, written it to a file and then used either a system call or
> Convert::UU to decode the file.
> 
> -v
> 
> on 8/9/00 1:04 PM, John Evans at evansj at kilnar.com wrote:
> 
>> I finally talked my boss into letting me do a little Perl for a large
>> project. It's a small bit, but at least it's a start. Anyway...
>> 
>> What I'm doing is using Mail::POP3Client to log into a POP3 server and
>> slurp off emails with attachments. Those attachments are MIME encoded so I
>> figure I'll use the MIME::Tools modules to decode the attachments.
>> 
>> The documentation (perldoc) is pretty convoluted (is MIME really that
>> complex?) and I was wondering if anyone had other documentation that they
>> could refer me to for MIME stuff or if they had done something like this
>> themselves.
>> 
>> Any input or insight would be great.
>> 
>> Thanks!
> 
> Vance Dubberly
> Director of Application Development
> ColoradoSprings.com - WOW! Marketing
> Freedom Interactive Media of Colorado, Inc.
> 219 W Colorado, Suite 204
> Colorado Springs, Colorado  80918
> 719.577.4848 x101
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