Getting message body structure

saurabh.hirani has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi guys,

I am writing a sub which takes in a email message string as input and decides whether to send it or not depending upon certain parameters like message size, attachments types and their sizes, etc.

I know that in order to determine the exact size of the message I will have to decode the attachments for which I need to parse it through MIME::Parser. But I wanted to achieve a simple first round elimination by looking at the sender addr, rcpt addr, attachment types (not their sizes) and if the message satisifies these constraints, create a MIME::Parser object

The reason is to delay decoding of message attachments as it would be an expensive operation for heavy attachments. I have done this before on an IMAP mailbox using Mail::IMAPClient::BodyStructure which gives me a data struct representing the body of the message. But it internally parses an IMAP command output which is not useful here.

Is there a Perl Module which can give me the header and body of the message in a parseable data structure without decoding the attachments?

Comment on Getting message body structure

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Getting message body structure by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on May 20, 2009 at 16:14 UTC
Isn't the header just there? Start reading lines.	[reply]
Re: Getting message body structure by skx (Parson) on May 20, 2009 at 19:55 UTC
Email::Simple seems like it will do the job ..? Steve --	[reply]
Re^2: Getting message body structure by saurabh.hirani (Beadle) on May 21, 2009 at 12:11 UTC
Thanks for your feedback. I had considered using Email::Simple. That would solve checking against header entities like from, to, subject, etc. But I also wanted to check if the message contains any of the restricted attachments defined in the configuration. So in my quest for the determining structure of email message cheaply, I also looked at the following: Email::MIME (thinking it to be lighter than MIME::Parser) MIME::Structure (the name suggests the ideal solution) But both of these modules do not drill down into message/rfc822 headers i.e. if I write an email with a covering note and an image attachment, these modules will show that my email contains - text/plain and image/gif, which is what I want. But if I forward this mail to someone with a covering note then they should show - text/plain, message/rfc822 and its children - text/plain and image/gif from the original msg. But they show - text/plain and message/rfc822 - they don't drill down into message/rfc822. And yes, I did call the sub parsing the message recursively for message/rfc822. But then I dumped the object hash of these modules and saw that they stop drilling once they hit the message/rfc822 header. I don't know if it is a design decision but it doesn't help me. So I am going to do the following - for checking against headers use Email::Simple which benchmarks (using Benchmark module) to be much faster than the same check using MIME::Parser. And for checking attachment names and their mime types, I have no choice but to resort to MIME::Parser.	[reply]


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