NAME

MIME-tools - modules for parsing (and creating!) MIME entities

SYNOPSIS

Here's some pretty basic code for parsing a MIME message, and outputting its decoded components to a given directory:

use MIME::Parser;
 
# Create parser, and set the output directory:
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_dir("$ENV{HOME}/mimemail");
 
# Parse input:
$entity = $parser->read(\*STDIN) or die "couldn't parse MIME stream";

# Take a look at the top-level entity (and any parts it has):
$entity->dump_skeleton;

Here's some code which composes and sends a MIME message containing three parts: a text file, an attached GIF, and some more text:

    use MIME::Entity;

    # Create the top-level, and set up the mail headers:
    $top = build MIME::Entity Type    =>"multipart/mixed",
                              From    => "me\@myhost.com",
	                      To      => "you\@yourhost.com",
                              Subject => "Hello, nurse!";
    
    # Part #1: a simple text document: 
    attach $top  Path=>"./testin/short.txt";
    
    # Part #2: a GIF file:
    attach $top  Path        => "./docs/mime-sm.gif",
                 Type        => "image/gif",
                 Encoding    => "base64";
        
    # Part #3: some literal text:
    attach $top  Data=>$message;
    
    # Send it:
    open MAIL, "| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -i" or die "open: $!";
    $top->print(\*MAIL);
    close MAIL;

DESCRIPTION

MIME-tools is a collection of Perl5 MIME:: modules for parsing, decoding, and generating single- or multipart (even nested multipart) MIME messages. (Yes, kids, that means you can send messages with attached GIF files).

A QUICK TOUR

Overview of the classes

Here are the classes you'll generally be dealing with directly:

        .------------.       .------------.           
        | MIME::     |------>| MIME::     |
        | Parser     |  isa  | ParserBase |   
        `------------'       `------------'
           | parse()
           | returns a...
           |
           |
           |
           |    head()       .--------.
           |    returns...   | MIME:: | get()
           V       .-------->| Head   | etc... 
        .--------./          `--------'      
  .---> | MIME:: | 
  `-----| Entity |           .--------. 
parts() `--------'\          | MIME:: | 
returns            `-------->| Body   |
sub-entities    bodyhandle() `--------'
(if any)        returns...       | open() 
                                 | returns...
                                 | 
                                 V  
                             .--------. read()    
                             | IO::   | getline()  
                             | Handle | print()          
                             `--------' etc...

To illustrate, parsing works this way:

The "parser" parses the MIME stream. Every "parser" inherits from the "parser base" class, which does the real work. When a message is parsed, the result is an "entity".
An "entity" has a "head" and a "body". Entities are MIME message parts.
A "body" knows where the data is. You can ask to "open" this data source for reading or writing, and you will get back an "I/O handle".
An "I/O handle" knows how to read/write the data. It is an object that is basically like an IO::Handle or a FileHandle... it can be any class, so long as it supports a small, standard set of methods for reading from or writing to the underlying data source.

A typical multipart message containing two parts -- a textual greeting and an "attached" GIF file -- would be a tree of MIME::Entity objects, each of which would have its own MIME::Head. Like this:

.--------.
| MIME:: | Content-type: multipart/mixed 
| Entity | Subject: Happy Samhaine!
`--------'
     |
     `----.
    parts |
          |   .--------.   
          |---| MIME:: | Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
          |   | Entity | Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
          |   `--------' 
          |   .--------.   
          |---| MIME:: | Content-type: image/gif
              | Entity | Content-transfer-encoding: base64
              `--------' Content-disposition: inline; filename="hs.gif"

Parsing, in a nutshell

You usually start by creating an instance of MIME::Parser (a subclass of the abstract MIME::ParserBase), and setting up certain parsing parameters: what directory to save extracted files to, how to name the files, etc.

You then give that instance a readable filehandle on which waits a MIME message. If all goes well, you will get back a MIME::Entity object (a subclass of Mail::Internet), which consists of...

A MIME::Head (a subclass of Mail::Header) which holds the MIME header data.
A MIME::Body, which is a object that knows where the body data is. You ask this object to "open" itself for reading, and it will hand you back an "I/O handle" for reading the data: this is a FileHandle-like object, and could be of any class, so long as it conforms to a subset of the IO::Handle interface.

If the original message was a multipart document, the MIME::Entity object will have a non-empty list of "parts", each of which is in turn a MIME::Entity (which might also be a multipart entity, etc, etc...).

Internally, the parser (in MIME::ParserBase) asks for instances of MIME::Decoder whenever it needs to decode an encoded file. MIME::Decoder has a mapping from supported encodings (e.g., 'base64') to classes whose instances can decode them. You can add to this mapping to try out new/experiment encodings. You can also use MIME::Decoder by itself.

Composing, in a nutshell

All message composition is done via the MIME::Entity class. For single-part messages, you can use the "build" in MIME::Entity constructor to create MIME entities very easily.

For multipart messages, you can start by creating a top-level multipart entity with "build" in MIME::Entity, and then use the similar "attach" in MIME::Entity method to attach parts to that message. Please note: what most people think of as "a text message with an attached GIF file" is really a multipart message with 2 parts: the first being the text message, and the second being the GIF file.

When building MIME a entity, you'll have to provide two very important pieces of information: the content type and the content transfer encoding. The type is usually easy, as it is directly determined by the file format; e.g., an HTML file is text/html. The encoding, however, is trickier... for example, some HTML files are 7bit-compliant, but others might have very long lines and would need to be sent quoted-printable for reliability.

See the section on encoding/decoding for more details, as well as "A MIME PRIMER".

Encoding/decoding, in a nutshell

The MIME::Decoder class can be used to encode as well; this is done when printing MIME entities. All the standard encodings are supported (see "A MIME PRIMER" for details):

Encoding...       Normally used when message contents are...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
7bit              7-bit data with under 1000 chars/line, or multipart.
8bit              8-bit data with under 1000 chars/line.
binary            8-bit data with possibly long lines (or no line breaks).
quoted-printable  Text files with some 8-bit chars (e.g., Latin-1 text).
base64            Binary files.

Which encoding you choose for a given document depends largely on (1) what you know about the document's contents (text vs binary), and (2) whether you need the resulting message to have a reliable encoding for 7-bit Internet email transport.

In general, only quoted-printable and base64 guarantee reliable transport of all data; the other three "no-encoding" encodings simply pass the data through, and are only reliable if that data is 7bit ASCII with under 1000 characters per line, and has no conflicts with the multipart boundaries.

I've considered making it so that the content-type and encoding can be automatically inferred from the file's path, but that seems to be asking for trouble... or at least, for Mail::Cap...

Other stuff you can do

If you want to tweak the way this toolkit works (for example, to turn on debugging), use the routines in the MIME::ToolUtils module.

Good advice

Run with -w on. If you see a warning about a deprecated method, change your code ASAP. This will ease upgrades tremendously.
Don't try to MIME-encode using the non-standard MIME encodings. It's just not a good practice if you want people to be able to read your messages.
Be aware of possible thrown exceptions. For example, if your mail-handling code absolutely must not die, then perform mail parsing like this:
```
$entity = eval { $parser->parse(\*INPUT) };
```
Parsing is a complex process, and some components may throw exceptions if seriously-bad things happen. Since "seriously-bad" is in the eye of the beholder, you're better off catching possible exceptions instead of asking me to propagate undef up the stack. Use of exceptions in reusable modules is one of those religious issues we're never all going to agree upon; thankfully, that's what eval{} is good for.

NOTES

Terminology

Here are some excerpts from RFC-1521 explaining the terminology we use; each is accompanied by the equivalent in MIME:: module terms...

Message

From RFC-1521:

The term "message", when not further qualified, means either the
(complete or "top-level") message being transferred on a network, or
a message encapsulated in a body of type "message".

There currently is no explicit package for messages; under MIME::, messages are streams of data which may be read in from files or filehandles.

Body part

From RFC-1521:

The term "body part", in this document, means one of the parts of the
body of a multipart entity. A body part has a header and a body, so
it makes sense to speak about the body of a body part.

Since a body part is just a kind of entity (see below), a body part is represented by an instance of MIME::Entity.

Entity

From RFC-1521:

The term "entity", in this document, means either a message or a body
part.  All kinds of entities share the property that they have a
header and a body.

An entity is represented by an instance of MIME::Entity. There are instance methods for recovering the header (a MIME::Head) and the body (a MIME::Body).

Header

This is the top portion of the MIME message, which contains the Content-type, Content-transfer-encoding, etc. Every MIME entity has a header, represented by an instance of MIME::Head. You get the header of an entity by sending it a head() message.

Body

From RFC-1521:

The term "body", when not further qualified, means the body of an
entity, that is the body of either a message or of a body part.

A body is represented by an instance of MIME::Body. You get the body of an entity by sending it a bodyhandle() message.

Compatibility

As of 4.x, MIME-tools can no longer emulate the old MIME-parser distribution. If you're installing this as a replacement for the MIME-parser 1.x release, you'll have to do a little tinkering with your code.

Design issues

Why assume that MIME objects are email objects?

I quote from Achim Bohnet, who gave feedback on v.1.9 (I think he's using the word header where I would use field; e.g., to refer to "Subject:", "Content-type:", etc.):

There is also IMHO no requirement [for] MIME::Heads to look 
like [email] headers; so to speak, the MIME::Head [simply stores] 
the attributes of a complex object, e.g.:

    new MIME::Head type => "text/plain",
                   charset => ...,
                   disposition => ..., ... ;

I agree in principle, but (alas and dammit) RFC-1521 says otherwise. RFC-1521 [MIME] headers are a syntactic subset of RFC-822 [email] headers. Perhaps a better name for these modules would be RFC1521:: instead of MIME::, but we're a little beyond that stage now. (Note: RFC-1521 has recently been obsoleted by RFCs 2045-2049, so it's just as well we didn't go that route...)

However, in my mind's eye, I see a mythical abstract class which does what Achim suggests... so you could say:

     my $attrs = new MIME::Attrs type => "text/plain",
				 charset => ...,
                                 disposition => ..., ... ;

We could even make it a superclass or companion class of MIME::Head, such that MIME::Head would allow itself to be initiallized from a MIME::Attrs object.

In the meanwhile, look at the build() and attach() methods of MIME::Entity: they follow the spirit of this mythical class.

To subclass or not to subclass?

When I originally wrote these modules for the CPAN, I agonized for a long time about whether or not they really should subclass from Mail::Internet (then at version 1.17). Thanks to Graham Barr, who graciously evolved MailTools 1.06 to be more MIME-friendly, unification was achieved at MIME-tools release 2.0. The benefits in reuse alone have been substantial.

Questionable practices

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline on input

RFC-1521 dictates that MIME streams have lines terminated by CRLF ("\r\n"). However, it is extremely likely that folks will want to parse MIME streams where each line ends in the local newline character "\n" instead.

An attempt has been made to allow the parser to handle both CRLF and newline-terminated input.

See MIME::ParserBase for further details.

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when decoding

The "7bit" and "8bit" decoders will decode both a "\n" and a "\r\n" end-of-line sequence into a "\n".

The "binary" decoder (default if no encoding specified) still outputs stuff verbatim... so a MIME message with CRLFs and no explicit encoding will be output as a text file that, on many systems, will have an annoying ^M at the end of each line... but this is as it should be.

See MIME::ParserBase for further details.

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when encoding/composing

All encoders currently output the end-of-line sequence as a "\n", with the assumption that the local mail agent will perform the conversion from newline to CRLF when sending the mail.

However, there probably should be an option to output CRLF as per RFC-1521. I'm currently working on a good mechanism for this.

See MIME::ParserBase for further details.

Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines

First, let's get something straight: this is an evil, EVIL practice. If your mailer creates multipart boundary strings that contain newlines, give it two weeks notice and find another one. If your mail robot receives MIME mail like this, regard it as syntactically incorrect, which it is.

See MIME::ParserBase for further details.

A MIME PRIMER

So you need to parse (or create) MIME, but you're not quite up on the specifics? No problem...

Content types

This indicates what kind of data is in the MIME message, usually as majortype/minortype. The standard major types are shown below. A more-comprehensive listing may be found in RFC-2046.

application: Data which does not fit in any of the other categories, particularly data to be processed by some type of application program. application/octet-stream, application/gzip, application/postscript...
audio: Audio data. audio/basic...
image: Graphics data. image/gif, image/jpeg...
message: A message, usually another mail or MIME message. message/rfc822...
multipart: A message containing other messages. multipart/mixed, multipart/alternative...
text: Textual data, meant for humans to read. text/plain, text/html...
video: Video or video+audio data. video/mpeg...

Content transfer encodings

This is how the message body is packaged up for safe transit. There are the 5 major MIME encodings. A more-comprehensive listing may be found in RFC-2045.

7bit: No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that no 8-bit characters are present, and that lines do not exceed 1000 characters in length (including the CRLF).
8bit: No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that the message might contain 8-bit characters, and that lines do not exceed 1000 characters in length (including the CRLF).
binary: No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that the message might contain 8-bit characters, and that lines may exceed 1000 characters in length. Such messages are the least likely to get through mail gateways.
base64: A standard encoding, which maps arbitrary binary data to the 7bit domain. Like "uuencode", but very well-defined. This is how you should send essentially binary information (tar files, GIFs, JPEGs, etc.).
quoted-printable: A standard encoding, which maps arbitrary line-oriented data to the 7bit domain. Useful for encoding messages which are textual in nature, yet which contain non-ASCII characters (e.g., Latin-1, Latin-2, or any other 8-bit alphabet).

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Eryq (eryq@zeegee.com), ZeeGee Software Inc (http://www.zeegee.com).

SUPPORT

Please email me directly with questions/problems (see AUTHOR below).

If you want to be placed on an email distribution list (not a mailing list!) for MIME-tools, and receive bug reports, patches, and updates as to when new MIME-tools releases are planned, just email me and say so. If your project is using MIME-tools, it might not be a bad idea to find out about those bugs before they become problems...

CHANGE LOG

Future plans

Dress up mimedump and mimeexplode utilities to take cmd line options for directory, environment vars (MIMEDUMP_OUTPUT, etc.).
Support for S/MIME and message/partial?

Current events

Version 4.122

Resolved CORE::open warnings for 5.005. Thanks to several folks for this bug report.

Version 4.121

Fixed MIME::Words infinite recursion. Thanks to several folks for this bug report.

Version 4.117

Nicer MIME::Entity::build. No longer outputs warnings with undefined Filename, and now accepts Charset as well. Thanks to Jason Tibbits III for the inspirational patch.

Documentation fixes. Hopefully we've seen the last of the pod2man warnings...

Better test logging. Now uses ExtUtils::TBone.

Version 4.116

Bug fix: MIME::Head and MIME::Entity were not downcasing the content-type as they claimed. This has now been fixed. Thanks to Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira for finding this.

Version 4.114

Gzip64-encoding has been improved, and turned off as a default, since it depends on having gzip installed. See MIME::Decoder::Gzip64 if you want to activate it in your app. You can now set up the gzip/gunzip commands to use, as well. Thanks to Paul J. Schinder for finding this bug.

Version 4.113

Bug fix: MIME::ParserBase was accidentally folding newlines in header fields. Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for spotting this.

Version 4.112

MIME::Entity::print_body now recurses when printing multipart entities, and prints "everything following the header." This is more likely what people expect to happen. PLEASE read the "two body problem" section of MIME::Entity's docs.

Version 4.111

Clean build/test on Win95 using 5.004. Whew.

Version 4.110

Added make_multipart() and make_singlepart() in MIME::Entity.

Improved handling/saving of preamble/epilogue.

Version 4.109

Overall

Major version shift to 4.x accompanies numerous structural changes, and the deletion of some long-deprecated code. Many apologies to those who are inconvenienced by the upgrade.

MIME::IO deprecated. You'll see IO::Scalar, IO::ScalarArray, and IO::Wrap to make this toolkit work.

MIME::Entity deep code. You can now deep-copy MIME entities (except for on-disk data files).

Encoding/decoding

MIME::Latin1 deprecated, and 8-to-7 mapping removed. Really, MIME::Latin1 was one of my more dumber ideas. It's still there, but if you want to map 8-bit characters to Latin1 ASCII approximations when 7bit encoding, you'll have to request it explicitly. But use quoted-printable for your 8-bit documents; that's what it's there for!

7bit and 8bit "encoders" no longer encode. As per RFC-2045, these just do a pass-through of the data, but they'll warn you if you send bad data through.

MIME::Entity suggests encoding. Now you can ask MIME::Entity's build() method to "suggest" a legal encoding based on the body and the content-type. No more guesswork! See the "mimesend" example.

New module structure for MIME::Decoder classes. It should be easier for you to see what's happening.

New MIME decoders! Support added for decoding x-uuencode, and for decoding/encoding x-gzip64. You'll need "gzip" to make the latter work.

Quoted-printable back on track... and then some. The 'quoted-printable' decoder now uses the newest MIME::QuotedPrint, and amends its output with guideline #8 from RFC2049 (From/.). Thanks to Denis N. Antonioli for suggesting this.

Parsing

Preamble and epilogue are now saved. These are saved in the parsed entities as simple string-arrays, and are output by print() if there. Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.

The "multipart/digest" semantics are now preserved. Parts of digest messages have their mime_type() defaulted to "message/rfc822" instead of "text/plain", as per the RFC. Thanks to Carsten Heyl for suggesting this.

Output

Well-defined, more-complete print() output. When printing an entity, the output is now well-defined if the entity came from a MIME::Parser, even if using parse_nested_messages. See MIME::Entity for details.

You can prevent recommended filenames from being output. This possible security hole has been plugged; when building MIME entities, you can specify a body path but suppress the filename in the header. Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.

Bug fixes

Win32 installations should work. The binmode() calls should work fine on Win32 now. Thanks to numerous folks for their patches.

MIME::Head::add() now no longer downcases its argument. Thanks to Brandon Browning & Jason L. Tibbitts for finding this bug.

Old news

Version 3.204

Bug in MIME::Head::original_text fixed. Well, it took a while, but another bug surfaced from my transition from 1.x to 2.x. This method was, quite idiotically, sorting the header fields. Thanks, as usual, to Andreas Koenig for spotting this one.

MIME::ParserBase no longer defaults to RFC-1522-decoding headers. The documentation correctly stated that the default setting was to not RFC-1522-decode the headers. The code, on the other hand, was init'ing this parser option in the "on" position. This has been fixed.

MIME::ParserBase::parse_nested_messages reexamined. If you use this feature, please re-read the documentation. It explains a little more precisely what the ramifications are.

MIME::Entity tries harder to ensure MIME compliance. It is now a fatal error to use certain bad combinations of content type and encoding when "building", or to attempt to "attach" to anything that is not a multipart document. My apologies if this inconveniences anyone, but it was just too darn easy before for folks to create bad MIME, and gosh darn it, good libraries should at least try to protect you from mistakes.

The "make" now halts if you don't have the right stuff, provided your MakeMaker supports PREREQ_PM. See the "REQUIREMENTS" section for what you need to install this package. I still provide old courtesy copies of the MIME:: decoding modules. Thanks to Hugo van der Sanden for suggesting this.

The "make test" is far less chatty. Okay, okay, STDERR is evil. Now a "make test" will just give you the important stuff: do a "make test TEST_VERBOSE=1" if you want the gory details (advisable if sending me a bug report). Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.

Version 3.203

No, there haven't been any major changes between 2.x and 3.x. The major-version increase was from a few more tweaks to get $VERSION to be calculated better and more efficiently (I had been using RCS version numbers in a way which created problems for users of CPAN::). After a couple of false starts, all modules have been upgraded to RCS 3.201 or higher.

You can now parse a MIME message from a scalar, an array-of-scalars, or any MIME::IO-compliant object (including IO:: objects.) Take a look at parse_data() in MIME::ParserBase. The parser code has been modified to support the MIME::IO interface. Thanks to fellow Chicagoan Tim Pierce (and countless others) for asking.

More sensible toolkit configuration. A new config() method in MIME::ToolUtils makes a lot of toolkit-wide configuration cleaner. Your old calls will still work, but with deprecation warnings.

You can now sign messages just like in Mail::Internet. See MIME::Entity for the interface.

You can now remove signatures from messages just like in Mail::Internet. See MIME::Entity for the interface.

You can now compute/strip content lengths and other non-standard MIME fields. See sync_headers() in MIME::Entity. Thanks to Tim Pierce for bringing the basic problem to my attention.

Many warnings are now silent unless $^W is true. That means unless you run your Perl with -w, you won't see deprecation warnings, non-fatal-error messages, etc. But of course you run with -w, so this doesn't affect you. :-)

Completed the 7-bit encodings in MIME::Latin1. We hadn't had complete coverage in the conversion from 8- to 7-bit; now we do. Thanks to Rolf Nelson for bringing this to my attention.

Fixed broken parse_two() in MIME::ParserBase. BTW, if your code worked with the "broken" code, it should still work. Thanks again to Tim Pierce for bringing this to my attention.

Version 2.14

Just a few bug fixes to improve compatibility with Mail-Tools 1.08, and with the upcoming Perl 5.004 release. Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for reporting the problems so quickly.

Version 2.13

New features

Added RFC-1522-style decoding of encoded header fields. Header decoding can now be done automatically during parsing via the new decode() method in MIME::Head... just tell your parser object that you want to decode_headers(). Thanks to Kent Boortz for providing the idea, and the baseline RFC-1522-decoding code!

Building MIME messages is even easier. Now, when you use MIME::Entity's build() or attach(), you can also supply individual mail headers to set (e.g., -Subject, -From, -To).

Added Disposition to MIME::Entity's build() method. Thanks to Kurt Freytag for suggesting this feature.

An X-Mailer header is now output by default in all MIME-Entity-prepared messages, so any bad MIME we generate can be traced back to this toolkit.

Added purge() method to MIME::Entity for deleteing leftover files. Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for suggesting this feature.

Added seek() and tell() methods to built-in MIME::IO classes. Only guaranteed to work when reading! Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for suggesting this feature.

When parsing a multipart message with apparently no boundaries, the error message you get has been improved. Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.

Bug fixes

Patched over a Perl 5.002 (and maybe earlier and later) bug involving FileHandle::new_tmpfile. It seems that the underlying filehandles were not being closed when the FileHandle objects went out of scope! There is now an internal routine that creates true FileHandle objects for anonymous temp files. Thanks to Dragomir R. Radev and Zyx for reporting the weird behavior that led to the discovery of this bug.

MIME::Entity's build() method now warns you if you give it an illegal boundary string, and substitutes one of its own.

MIME::Entity's build() method now generates safer, fully-RFC-1521-compliant boundary strings.

Bug in MIME::Decoder's install() method was fixed. Thanks to Rolf Nelson and Nickolay Saukh for finding this.

Changed FileHandle::new_tmpfile to FileHandle->new_tmpfile, so some Perl installations will be happier. Thanks to Larry W. Virden for finding this bug.

Gave =over an arg of 4 in all PODs. Thanks to Larry W. Virden for pointing out the problems of bare =over's

Version 2.04

A bug in MIME::Entity's output method was corrected. MIME::Entity::print now outputs everything to the desired filehandle explicitly. Thanks to Jake Morrison for pointing out the incompatibility with Mail::Header.

Version 2.03

Fixed bug in autogenerated filenames resulting from transposed "if" statement in MIME::Parser, removing spurious printing of header as well. (Annoyingly, this bug is invisible if debugging is turned on!) Thanks to Andreas Koenig for bringing this to my attention.

Fixed bug in MIME::Entity::body() where it was using the bodyhandle completely incorrectly. Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to my attention.

Fixed MIME::Head::VERSION so CPAN:: is happier. Thanks to Larry Virden for bringing this to my attention.

Fixed undefined-variable warnings when dumping skeleton (happened when there was no Subject: line) Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to my attention.

Version 2.02

Stupid, stupid bugs in both BASE64 encoding and decoding were fixed. Thanks to Phil Abercrombie for locating them.

Version 2.01

Modules now inherit from the new Mail:: modules! This means big changes in behavior.

MIME::Parser can now store message data in-core. There were a lot of requests for this feature.

MIME::Entity can now compose messages. There were a lot of requests for this feature.

Added option to parse "message/rfc822" as a pseduo-multipart document. Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.

Ancient history

Version 1.13

MIME::Head now no longer requires space after ":", although either a space or a tab after the ":" will be swallowed if there. Thanks to Igor Starovoitov for pointing out this shortcoming.

Version 1.12

Fixed bugs in parser where CRLF-terminated lines were blowing out the handling of preambles/epilogues. Thanks to Russell Sutherland for reporting this bug.

Fixed idiotic is_multipart() bug. Thanks to Andreas Koenig for noticing it.

Added untested binmode() calls to parser for DOS, etc. systems. No idea if this will work...

Reorganized the output_path() methods to allow easy use of inheritance, as per Achim Bohnet's suggestion.

Changed MIME::Head to report mime_type more accurately.

POSIX module no longer loaded by Parser if perl >= 5.002. Hey, 5.001'ers: let me know if this breaks stuff, okay?

Added unsupported ./examples directory.

Version 1.11

Converted over to using Makefile.PL. Thanks to Andreas Koenig for the much-needed kick in the pants...

Added t/*.t files for testing. Eeeeeeeeeeeh...it's a start.

Fixed bug in default parsing routine for generating output paths; it was warning about evil filenames if there simply were no recommended filenames. D'oh!

Fixed redefined parts() method in Entity.

Fixed bugs in Head where field name wasn't being case folded.

Version 1.10

A typo was causing the epilogue of an inner multipart message to be swallowed to the end of the OUTER multipart message; this has now been fixed. Thanks to Igor Starovoitov for reporting this bug.

A bad regexp for parameter names was causing some parameters to be parsed incorrectly; this has also been fixed. Thanks again to Igor Starovoitov for reporting this bug.

It is now possible to get full control of the filenaming algorithm before output files are generated, and the default algorithm is safer. Thanks to Laurent Amon for pointing out the problems, and suggesting some solutions.

Fixed illegal "simple" multipart test file. D'OH!

Version 1.9

No changes: 1.8 failed CPAN registration

Version 1.8.

Fixed incompatibility with 5.001 and FileHandle::new_tmpfile Added COPYING file, and improved README.

AUTHOR

MIME-tools was created by:

  ___  _ _ _   _  ___ _     
 / _ \| '_| | | |/ _ ' /    Eryq, (eryq@zeegee.com)
|  __/| | | |_| | |_| |     President, ZeeGee Software Inc.
 \___||_|  \__, |\__, |__   http://www.zeegee.com/
           |___/    |___/

Released as MIME-parser (1.0): 28 April 1996. Released as MIME-tools (2.0): Halloween 1996. Released as MIME-tools (4.0): Christmas 1997.

VERSION

$Revision: 4.122 $

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This kit would not have been possible but for the direct contributions of the following:

   Gisle Aas             The MIME encoding/decoding modules.
   Laurent Amon          Bug reports and suggestions.
   Graham Barr           The new MailTools.
   Achim Bohnet          Numerous good suggestions, including the I/O model.
   Kent Boortz           Initial code for RFC-1522-decoding of MIME headers.
   Andreas Koenig        Numerous good ideas, tons of beta testing,
                           and help with CPAN-friendly packaging.
   Igor Starovoitov      Bug reports and suggestions.
   Jason L Tibbitts III  Bug reports, suggestions, patches.

Not to mention the Accidental Beta Test Team, whose bug reports (and comments) have been invaluable in improving the whole:

Phil Abercrombie
Brandon Browning
Kurt Freytag
Steve Kilbane
Jake Morrison
Rolf Nelson
Joel Noble    
Michael W. Normandin 
Tim Pierce
Andrew Pimlott
Dragomir R. Radev
Nickolay Saukh
Russell Sutherland
Larry Virden
Zyx

Please forgive me if I've accidentally left you out. Better yet, email me, and I'll put you in.

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NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

A QUICK TOUR

Overview of the classes

Parsing, in a nutshell

Composing, in a nutshell

Encoding/decoding, in a nutshell

Other stuff you can do

Good advice

NOTES

Terminology

Compatibility

Design issues

Questionable practices

A MIME PRIMER

Content types

Content transfer encodings

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

SUPPORT

CHANGE LOG

Future plans

Current events

Old news

Ancient history

AUTHOR

VERSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SEE ALSO

Module Install Instructions