mime::tools(3)

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 direc
tory:
    use MIME::Parser;
    ### Create parser, and set some parsing options:
    my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
    $parser->output_under("$ENV{HOME}/mimemail");
    ### Parse input:
    $entity = $parser->parse(TDIN) or die "parse failed0;
    ### 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    =    MIME::Entity->build(Type        =>"multipart/mixed",
                               From    => "me@myhost.com",
                               To                       =>
"you@yourhost.com",
                               Subject      =>     "Hello,
nurse!");
    ### Part #1: a simple text document:
    $top->attach(Path=>"./testin/short.txt");
    ### Part #2: a GIF file:
    $top->attach(Path        => "./docs/mime-sm.gif",
                 Type        => "image/gif",
                 Encoding    => "base64");
    ### Part #3: some literal text:
    $top->attach(Data=>$message);
    ### Send it:
    open MAIL, "| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi  -oem"  or  die
"open: $!";
    $top->print(AIL);
    close MAIL;
For more examples, look at the scripts in the examples
directory of the MIME-tools distribution.

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).

REQUIREMENTS

You will need the following installed on your system:: File::Path
File::Spec
IPC::Open2 (optional)
IO::Scalar, ... from the IO-stringy dis; tribution
MIME::Base64
MIME::QuotedPrint
Net::SMTP
Mail::Internet, ... from the MailTools distri; bution.
See the Makefile.PL in your distribution for the most-com prehensive list of prerequisite modules and their version numbers.

A QUICK TOUR

Overview of the classes

Here are the classes you'll generally be dealing with directly:: (START HERE) results() .-----------------.
.-------->| MIME::; .-----------. / | Parser::Results
| MIME:: |--' `-----------------'
| Parser |--. .-----------------.
`-----------' filer() | MIME::
| parse() `-------->| Parser::Filer
| gives you `-----------------'
| a...

output_path()
|

determines
|

path() of...
| 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. A parser is an: instance of "MIME::Parser". You hand it an input
stream (like a filehandle) to parse a message from: if
the parse is successful, the result is an "entity".
� A parsed message is represented by an "entity". An: entity is an instance of "MIME::Entity" (a subclass of
"Mail::Internet"). If the message had "parts" (e.g.,
attachments), then those parts are "entities" as well,
contained inside the top-level entity. Each entity
has a "head" and a "body".
� The entity's "head" contains information about the: message. A "head" is an instance of "MIME::Head" (a subclass of "Mail::Header"). It contains information
from the message header: content type, sender, subject
line, etc.
� The entity's "body" knows where the message data is.: You can ask to "open" this data source for reading or writing, and you will get back an "I/O handle".
� You can ooppeenn(()) a "body" and get an "I/O handle" to: read/write message data. This handle is an object that is basically like an IO::Handle or a FileHan
dle... 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 tex tual 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 messages
You usually start by creating an instance of MIME::Parser 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 con
forms 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::Parser) 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 messages
All message composition is done via the MIME::Entity class. For single-part messages, you can use the
MIME::Entity/build constructor to create MIME entities very easily.
For multipart messages, you can start by creating a toplevel "multipart" entity with MMIIMMEE::::EEnnttiittyy::::bbuuiilldd(()), and then use the similar MMIIMMEE::::EEnnttiittyy::::aattttaacchh(()) method to attach parts to that message. Please note: what most peo ple 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"-com pliant, 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".
Sending email
Since MIME::Entity inherits directly from Mail::Internet, you can use the normal Mail::Internet mechanisms to send email. For example,: $entity->smtpsend;
Encoding/decoding support
The MIME::Decoder class can be used to encode as well;
this is done when printing MIME entities. All the stan
dard 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 some 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-encod ing" encodings simply pass the data through, and are only reliable if that data is 7bit ASCII with under 1000 char acters 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...
Message-logging
MIME-tools is a large and complex toolkit which tries to deal with a wide variety of external input. It's some times helpful to see what's really going on behind the scenes. There are several kinds of messages logged by the toolkit itself:
Debug messages: These are printed directly to the STDERR, with a pre
fix of "MIME-tools: debug".; Debug message are only logged if you have turned
"debugging" on in the MIME::Tools configuration.
Warning messages: These are logged by the standard Perl warn() mechanism to indicate an unusual situation. They all have a
prefix of "MIME-tools: warning".; Warning messages are only logged if $^W is set true
and MIME::Tools is not configured to be "quiet".
Error messages: These are logged by the standard Perl warn() mechanism to indicate that something actually failed. They all
have a prefix of "MIME-tools: error".; Error messages are only logged if $^W is set true and
MIME::Tools is not configured to be "quiet".
Usage messages: Unlike "typical" warnings above, which warn about
problems processing data, usage-warnings are for
alerting developers of deprecated methods and suspi
cious invocations.; Usage messages are currently only logged if $^W is set
true and MIME::Tools is not configured to be "quiet".
When a MIME::Parser (or one of its internal helper
classes) wants to report a message, it generally does so
by recording the message to the MIME::Parser::Results object immediately before invoking the appropriate func
tion above. That means each parsing run has its own
trace-log which can be examined for problems.
Configuring the toolkit
If you want to tweak the way this toolkit works (for exam
ple, to turn on debugging), use the routines in the
MIME::Tools module.
debugging: Turn debugging on or off. Default is false (off).

MIME::Tools->debugging(1);
quiet: Turn the reporting of warning/error messages on or
off. Default is true, meaning that these message are
silenced.

MIME::Tools->quiet(1);
version: Return the toolkit version.

print MIME::Tools->version, "0;

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO

Take a look at the examples

The MIME-Tools distribution comes with an "examples"
directory. The scripts in there are basically just
tossed-together, but they'll give you some ideas of how to
use the parser.

Run with warnings enabled

Always run your Perl script with "-w". If you see a warn
ing about a deprecated method, change your code ASAP.
This will ease upgrades tremendously.

Avoid non-standard encodings

Don't try to MIME-encode using the non-standard MIME
encodings. It's just not a good practice if you want peo
ple to be able to read your messages.

Plan for thrown exceptions

For example, if your mail-handling code absolutely must not die, then perform mail parsing like this:: $entity = eval { $parser->parse(NPUT) };
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 bet ter 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.
Check the parser results for warnings/errors
As of 5.3xx, the parser tries extremely hard to give you a MIME::Entity. If there were any problems, it logs warn ings/errors to the underlying "results" object (see MIME::Parser::Results). Look at that object after each parse. Print out the warnings and errors, especially if messages don't parse the way you thought they would.
Don't plan on printing exactly what you parsed!
Parsing is a (slightly) lossy operation. Because of things like ambiguities in base64-encoding, the following is not going to spit out its input unchanged in all cases:: $entity = $parser->parse(TDIN);
$entity->print(TDOUT);
If you're using MIME::Tools to process email, remember to save the data you parse if you want to send it on unchanged. This is vital for things like PGP-signed email.
Understand how international characters are represented
The MIME standard allows for text strings in headers to contain characters from any character set, by using spe cial sequences which look like this:: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?=
To be consistent with the existing Mail::Field classes, MIME::Tools does not automatically unencode these strings, since doing so would lose the character-set information and interfere with the parsing of fields (see "decode_headers" in MIME::Parser for a full explanation). That means you should be prepared to deal with these encoded strings.
The most common question then is, how do I decode these encoded strings? The answer depends on what you want to decode them to: ASCII, Latin1, UTF-8, etc. Be aware that
your "target" representation may not support all possible
character sets you might encounter; for example, Latin1
(ISO-8859-1) has no way of representing Big5 (Chinese)
characters. A common practice is to represent "untrans
lateable" characters as "?"s, or to ignore them com
pletely.
To unencode the strings into some of the more-popular Western byte representations (e.g., Latin1, Latin2, etc.), you can use the decoders in MIME::WordDecoder (see MIME::WordDecoder). The simplest way is by using "unmime()", a function wrapped around your "default" decoder, as follows:: use MIME::WordDecoder;
...
$subject = unmime $entity->head->get('subject');
One place this is done automatically is in extracting the recommended filename for a part while parsing. That's why you should start by setting up the best "default" decoder if the default target of Latin1 isn't to your liking.

THINGS I DO THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline on input

RFC-1521 d0).atHowever,MitEistextremelyelikely thatinated by CRLF ("
folks will want to parse MIME streams where each line ends
in the local newline character "0 instead.

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

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when decoding

The0"end-of-line8sequenceointo ai"0.decode both a "0 and a "

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.

Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when encoding/composing

All encoders currently output the end-of-line sequence as
a "0, 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.

Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines

Let's get something straight: this is an evil, EVIL prac
tice. 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.

Ignoring non-header headers

People like to hand the parser raw messages straight from POP3 or from a mailbox. There is often predictable nonheader information in front of the real headers; e.g., the initial "From" line in the following message:: From - Wed Mar 22 02:13:18 2000
Return-Path: <eryq@zeegee.com>
Subject: Hello
The parser simply ignores such stuff quietly. Perhaps it shouldn't, but most people seem to want that behavior.
Fuzzing of empty multipart preambles
Please note that there is currently an ambiguity in the way preambles are parsed in. The following message frag ments both are regarded as having an empty preamble (where "0 indicates a newline character):: Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="xyz"
Subject: This message (#1) has an empty preamble; --xyz
...; Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="xyz"
Subject: This message (#2) also has an empty preamble; --xyz
...
In both cases, the first completely-empty line (after the "Subject") marks the end of the header.
But we should clearly ignore the second empty line in mes sage #2, since it fills the role of "the newline which is only there to make sure that the boundary is at the begin_ ning of a line". Such newlines are never part of the con tent preceding the boundary; thus, there is no preamble "content" in message #2.
However, it seems clear that message #1 also has no pream ble "content", and is in fact merely a compact representa tion of an empty preamble.
Use of a temp file during parsing
Why not do everything in core? Although the amount of core available on even a modest home system continues to grow, the size of attachments continues to grow with it. I wanted to make sure that even users with small systems could deal with decoding multi-megabyte sounds and movie files. That means not being core-bound.
As of the released 5.3xx, MIME::Parser gets by with only one temp file open per parser. This temp file provides a sort of infinite scratch space for dealing with the cur rent message part. It's fast and lightweight, but you should know about it anyway.
Why do I assume that MIME objects are email objects?
Achim Bohnet once pointed out that MIME headers do nothing more than store a collection of attributes, and thus could be represented as objects which don't inherit from Mail::Header.
I agree in principle, but 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 have been RFC1521:: instead of MIME::, but we're a little beyond that stage now.
When I originally wrote these modules for the CPAN, I ago
nized 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.

A MIME PRIMER

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

Glossary

Here are some definitions adapted from RFC-1521 explaining
the terminology we use; each is accompanied by the equiva
lent in MIME:: module terms...

attachment: An "attachment" is common slang for any part of a mul
tipart message -- except, perhaps, for the first part,
which normally carries a user message describing the
attachments that follow (e.g.: "Hey dude, here's that
GIF file I promised you.").; In our system, an attachment is just a MIME::Entity under the top-level entity, probably one of its parts.
body: The "body" of an entity is that portion of the entity
which follows the header and which contains the real
message content. For example, if your MIME message
has a GIF file attachment, then the body of that
attachment is the base64-encoded GIF file itself.; A body is represented by an instance of MIME::Body. You get the body of an entity by sending it a
bodyhandle() message.
body part: 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, it's rep
resented by an instance of MIME::Entity.
entity: An "entity" means either a /message or a /body part. All entities have a /header and a /body.; An entity is represented by an instance of
MIME::Entity. There are instance methods for recover ing 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-encod
ing", etc. Every MIME entity has a header, repre
sented by an instance of MIME::Head. You get the header of an entity by sending it a head() message.
message: A "message" generally means the complete (or
"top-level") message being transferred on a network.; There currently is no explicit package for "messages";
under MIME::, messages are streams of data which may
be read in from files or filehandles. You can think
of the MIME::Entity returned by the MIME::Parser as representing the full message.
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 cate
gories, 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. "multi
part/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 tran sit. There are the 5 major MIME encodings. A more-com prehensive 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-ori
ented data to the 7bit domain. Useful for encoding
messages which are textual in nature, yet which con
tain 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...

VERSION

$Revision: 5.411 $

CHANGE LOG

Version 5.411: Regenerated docs. Bug in HTML docs, now all fixed.
Version 5.410 (2000/11/23): Better detection of evil filenames. Now we check for filenames which are suspiciously long, and a new
MIME::Filer::exorcise_filename() method is used to try and remove the evil. Thanks to Jason Haar for the suggestion.
Version 5.409 (2000/11/12): Added functionality to MIME::WordDecoder, including support for plain US-ASCII.; MMIIMMEE::::TToooollss::::ttmmppooppeenn(()) made more flexible. You can now override the tmpfile-opening behavior.
Version 5.408 (2000/11/10): Added new Beta uunnmmiimmee(()) mechanism. See MIME::WordDe coder for full details. Also see "Understand how
international characters are represented".
Version 5.405 (2000/11/05): Added a ppuurrggee(()) that does what people want it to. Now, when a parse finishes and you want to delete
everything that was created by it, you can invoke
"purge()" on the parser's filer. All files/directo
ries created during the last parse should vanish.
Thanks to everyone who complained about MIME::Entity::purge.
Version 5.404 (2000/11/04): Added new automatic MIME-decoding of attachment file names with encoded (non-ASCII) characters. Hopefully this will do more good than harm. The use of
MIME::Parser::decode_headers() and MIME::Head::decode() has been deprecated in favor of the new MIME::Words "unmime" mechanism. Please see
"unmime" in MIME::Words.; Added tolerance for unquoted =?...?= in param values. This is in violation of the RFCs, but then, so are
some MUAs. Thanks to desti for bringing this to my attention.; Fixed supposedly-bad B-encoding. Thanks to Otto Frost for bringing this to my attention.
Version 5.316 (2000/09/21): Increased tolerance in MIME::Parser. Now will ignore bogus POP3 "+OK" line before header, as well as bogus
mailbox "From " line (both with warnings). Thanks to Antony OSullivan (ajos1) for suggesting this feature.; Fixed small epilogue-related bug in MMIIMMEE::::EEnnttiittyy::::pprriinntt__bbooddyy(()). Now it only outputs a final newline if the epilogue does not end in one
already. Support for checking the preamble/epilogue
in regression tests was also added. Thanks to Lars Hecking for bringing this issue up.; Updated documentation. All module manual pages should now direct readers to the main MIME-tools manual page.
Version 5.314 (2000/09/06): Fixed Makefile.PL to have less-restrictive requirement
for File::Spec (0.6).
Version 5.313 (2000/09/05): Fixed nasty bug with evil filenames. Certain evil filenames were getting replaced by internally-gener
ated filenames which were just as evil... ouch! If
your parser occasionally throws a fatal exception with
a "write-open" error message, then you have this bug.
Thanks to Julian Field and Antony OSullivan (ajos1) for delivering the evidence!

Beware the doctor
who cures seasonal head cold

by killing patient; Improved naming of extracted files. If a filename is regarded as evil, we guess that it might just be
because of part information, and attempt to find and
use the final path element.; Simplified message logging and made it more consis tent. For details, see "Message-logging".
Version 5.312 (2000/09/03): Fixed a Perl 5.7 sseelleecctt(()) incompatibility which caused "make test" to fail. Thanks to Nick Ing-Simmons for the patch.
Version 5.311 (2000/08/16): Blind fix for Win32 uudecoding bug. A missing binmode seems to be the culprit here; let's see if this fixes
it. Thanks to ajos1 for finding the culprit!

The carriage return
thumbs its nose at me, laughing:

DOS I/O *still* sucks
Version 5.310 (2000/08/15): Fixed a bug in the back-compat oouuttppuutt__pprreeffiixx(()) method of MIME::Parser. Basically, output prefixes were not being set through this mechanism. Thanks to ajos1 for the alert.

shift @_, ###

"shift at-underscore"
or @_ will have

bogus "self" object
Added some backcompat methods, like parse_FH(). Thanks (and apologies) to Alain Kotoujansky.
Added filenames-with-spaces support to MIME::Decoder::UU. Thanks to Richard Pun for the sug_ gestion.
Version 5.305 (2000/07/20): Added MIME::Entity::parts_DFS as convenient way to "get all parts". Thanks to Xavier Armengou for sug_ gesting this method.; Removed the Alpha notice. Still a few features to
tweak, but those will be minor.
Version 5.303 (2000/07/07): Fixed output bugs in new Filers. Scads of them: bad handling of filename collisions, bad implementation of
output_under(), bad linking to results, POD errors, you name it. If this had gone to CPAN, I'd have
issued a factory recall. ":-("

Errors, like beetles,
Multiply ferociously

In the small hours
Version 5.301 (2000/07/06): READ ME BEFORE UPGRADING PAST THIS POINT! New MIME::Parser::Filer class -- not fully backwards-com patible. In response to demand for more-comprehensive file-output strategies, I have decided that the best
thing to do is to split all the file-output logic
(output_path(), evil_filename(), etc.) into its own separate class, inheriting from the new
MIME::Parser::Filer class. If you override any of the following in a MIME::Parser subclass, you will need to
change your code accordingly:

evil_filename
output_dir
output_filename
output_path
output_prefix
output_under
My sincere apologies for any inconvenience this will cause, but it's ultimately for the best, and is quite likely the last structural change to 5.x. Thanks to Tyson Ackland for all the ideas. Incidentally, the new code also fixes a bug where identically-named files in the same message could clobber each other.: A message arrives:
"Here are three files, all named 'Foo'"; Only one survives. :-(
Fixed bug in MIME::Words header decoding. Underscores were not being handled properly. Thanks to Dominique Unruh and Doru Petrescu, who independently submitted the same fix within 2 hours of each other, after this
bug has lain dormant for months:: Two users, same bug,
same patch -- mere hours apart:; Truly, life is odd.
Removed escaping of underscore in regexps. Escaping the underscore (_) in regexps was sloppy and wrong
(escaped metacharacters may include anything in 24
and the newest Perls warn about it. Thanks to David Dyck for bringing this to my attention.: What, then, is a word?
Some letters, digits, and, yes:; Underscores as well
Added Force option to MIME::Entity's make_multipart. Thanks to Bob Glickstein for suggesting this.
Numerous fixlets to example code. Thanks to Doru Petrescu for these.
Added REQUIREMENTS section in docs. Long-overdue. Thanks to Ingo Schmiegel for motivating this.
Version 5.211 (2000/06/24): Fixed auto-uudecode bug. Parser was failing with "part did not end with expected boundary" error when
uuencoded entity was a singlepart message (ironically, uuencoded parts of multiparts worked fine). Thanks to Michael Mohlere for testing uudecode and finding this.

The hurrying bee
Flies far for nectar, missing

The nearest flowers

Say ten thousand times:

Complex cases may succeed

Where simple ones fail; Parse errors now generate warnings. Parser errors now cause warn()s to be generated if they are not turned
into fatal exceptions. This might be a little redun
dant, seeing as they are available in the "results",
but parser-warnings already cause warn()s. I can
always put in a "quiet" switch if people complain.; Miscellaneous cleanup. Documentation of MIME::Parser improved slightly, and a redundant warning was
removed.
Version 5.210 (2000/06/20): Change in "evil" filename. Made MIME::Parser's evil_filename stricter by having it reject "path"
characters: any of '/' '� ':' '[' ']'.

Just as with beauty
The eye of the beholder

Is where "evil" lives.; Documentation fixes. Corrected a number of docs in MIME::Entity which were obsoleted in the transition
from 4.x to 5.x. Thanks to Michael Fischer for point_ ing these out. For this one, a special 5-5-5-5 Haiku of anagrams:

Documentation
in mutant code, O!

Edit -- no, CUT! [moan]

I meant to un-doc...
IO::Lines usage bug fixed. MIME::Entity was missing a "use IO::Lines", which caused an exception when you
tried to use the body() method of MIME::Entity.
Thanks to Hideyo Imazu and Michael Fischer for point_ ing this out.: Bareword looks fine, but
Perl cries: "Whoa there... IO::Lines?; Never heard of it."
Version 5.209 (2000/06/10): Autodetection of uuencode. You can now tell the parser to hunt for uuencode inside what should be text
parts. See extract_uuencode() for full details. Beware: this is largely untested at the moment. Spe_ cial thanks to Michael Mohlere at ADJE Webmail, who was the
first -- and most-insistent -- user to request this; feature.; Faster parsing. Sped up the MIME::Decoder::NBit decoder quite a bit by using a variant of the chunking
trick I used for MIME::Decoder::Base64. I suspect
that the same trick (reading a big chunk plus the next
line to get a big block of lines) would work with
MIME::Decoder::QuotedPrint, but I don't have the time
or resources to check that right now (tested contribu
tions would be welcome). NBit encoding is more-conve
niently done line-by-line for now, because individual
line lengths must be checked.; Better use of core. MIME::Body::InCore is now used when you build() an entity with the Data parameter,
instead of MIME::Body::Scalar.; More documentation on toolkit configuration.
Version 5.207 (2000/06/09): Fixed wwhhiinnee(()) bug in MIME::Parser where the "warning" method whine() was called as a static function instead of invoked as an instance method. Thanks to Todd A. Bradfute for reporting this.

A simple warning
Invokes method as function:

"Warning" makes us die
Version 5.206 (2000/06/08): Ahem. Cough cough:

Way too many bugs
Thus, a self-imposed penance:

Write haiku for each; Fixed bug in MIME::Parser: the reader was not handling the odd (but legal) case where a multipart boundary is
followed by linear whitespace. Thanks to Jon Agnew for reporting this with the RFC citation.

Legal message fails
And 'round the globe, thousands cry:

READ THE RFC; Empty preambles are now handled properly by
MIME::Entity when printing: there is now no space
between the header-terminator and the initial bound
ary. Thanks to "sen_ml" for suggesting this.

Nature hates vacuum
But please refrain from tossing

Newlines in the void; Started using Benchmark for benchmarking.
Version 5.205 (2000/06/06): Added terminating newline to all parser messages, and
fixed small parser bug that was dropping parts when
errors occurred in certain places.
Version 5.203 (2000/06/05): Brand new parser based on new (private)
MIME::Parser::Reader and (public)
MIME::Parser::Results. Fast and yet simple and very
tolerant of bad MIME when desired. Message reporting
needs some muzzling.; MIME::Parser now has ignore_errors() set true by default.
Version 5.116 (2000/05/26): Removed Tmpfile.t test, which was causing a bogus
failure in "make test". Now we require 5.004 for
MIME::Parser anyway, so we don't need it. Thanks to Jonathan Cohn for reporting this.
Version 5.115 (2000/05/24): Fixed Ref.t bug, and documented how to remove parts
from a MIME::Entity.
Version 5.114 (2000/05/23): Entity now uses MIME::Lite-style default suggested
encoding.; More regression test have been added, and the "Size"
tests in Ref.t are skipped for text document (due to
CRLF differences between platforms).
Version 5.113 (2000/05/21): Major speed and structural improvements to the parser.
Major, MAJOR thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn, Jeremy; Gilbert,
and Doru Petrescu for all the patches, bench_; marking,
and Beta-testing!; Convenient new one-directory-per-message parsing mech anism.
Now through "MIME::Parser" method "out; put_under()",
you can tell the parser that you want it to create
a unique directory for each message parsed, to; hold the
resulting parts.; Elimination of $', $` and $&.
Wow... I still can't believe I missed this. D'OH!
Thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn for all his patches.; Pa0r.ser is more tolerant of weird EOL termination.
Some mailagents are can terminate lines with; "
We're okay with that now when we extract the; header.
Thanks to Joao Fonseca for pointing this out.; Parser is tolerant of "From " lines in headers.
Thanks to Joachim Wieland, Anthony Hinsinger, Mar_; ius Stan,
and numerous others.; Parser catches syntax errors in headers.
Thanks to Russell P. Sutherland for catching this.; Parser no longer warns when subtype is undefined.
Thanks to Eric-Olivier Le Bigot for his fix.; Better integration with Mail::Internet.
For example, smtpsend() should work fine.
Thanks to Michael Fischer and others for the; patch.; Miscellaneous cleanup.
Thanks to Marcus Brinkmann for additional helpful; input.
Thanks to Klaus Seidenfaden for good feedback on; 5.x Alpha!
Version 4.123 (1999/05/12): Cleaned up some of the tests for non-Unix OS'es. Will
require a few iterations, no doubt.
Version 4.122 (1999/02/09): Resolved CORE::open warnings for 5.005.
Thanks to several folks for this bug report.
Version 4.121 (1998/06/03): Fixed MIME::Words infinite recursion.
Thanks to several folks for this bug report.
Version 4.117 (1998/05/01): 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 (1998/02/14): Bug fix:
MIME::Head and MIME::Entity were not downcas; ing the
content-type as they claimed. This has now; been fixed. Thanks to Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira for finding this.
Version 4.114 (1998/02/12): 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 acti; vate 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 (1998/01/20): Bug fix:
MIME::ParserBase was accidentally folding new; lines in header fields. Thanks to Jason L. Tib_ bitts III for spotting this.
Version 4.112 (1998/01/17): MIME::Entity::print_body now recurses when printing multipart entities, and prints "everything fol
lowing 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 (1998/01/14): Clean build/test on Win95 using 5.004. Whew.
Version 4.110 (1998/01/11): Added make_multipart() and make_singlepart() in MIME::Entity.; Improved handling/saving of preamble/epilogue.
Version 4.109 (1998/01/10): Overall
Major version shift to 4.x accompanies numer ous 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 deepcopy 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 decod ing "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 out
put 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 sug_ gesting this.

The "multipart/digest" semantics are now pre served. 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 pprriinntt(()) 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. Tib_; bitts for suggesting this.
Bug fixes: Win32 installations should work. The bin_ mode() calls should work fine on Win32 now.
Thanks to numerous folks for their patches.; MMIIMMEE::::HHeeaadd::::aadddd(()) now no longer downcases its argument. Thanks to Brandon Browning & Jason L. Tibbitts for finding this bug.
Version 3.204: Bug in MIME::Head::original_text fixed. Well, it took a while, but another bug surfaced from my transi
tion 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-decod ing 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 docu; mentation. 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 combi; nations of content type and encoding when "build
ing", 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 PRE
REQ_PM. See "REQUIREMENTS" for what you need to
install this package. I still provide old cour
tesy 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_VER; BOSE=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 inter
face. Thanks to fellow Chicagoan Tim Pierce (and countless others) for asking.; More sensible toolkit configuration. A new con_ fig() method in MIME::ToolUtils makes a lot of
toolkit-wide configuration cleaner. Your old
calls will still work, but with deprecation warn
ings.; 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_head_ ers() 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 mes; sages, 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 Nel_ son for bringing this to my attention.; Fixed broken ppaarrssee__ttwwoo(()) 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_head
ers()". 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 suggest_ ing 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 delete
ing leftover files. Thanks to Jason L. Tib_ bitts 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 dis_ covery of this bug.

MIME::Entity's "build()" method now warns you if
you give it an illegal boundary string, and sub
stitutes 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 FileHan
dle->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 Morri_ son 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 atten_ tion.; Fixed undefined-variable warnings when dumping skele
ton (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 decod ing were fixed. Thanks to Phil Abercrombie for locat_ ing 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 pseduomultipart document. Thanks to Andreas Koenig for sug_ gesting this.
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 accu
rately.; 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 multi
part 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 filenam
ing 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 FileHan
dle::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. Released as MIME-tools (5.0): Mother's Day 2000.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This kit would not have been possible but for the direct contributions of the following:: Gisle Aas The MIME encoding/decoding mod; ules.
Laurent Amon Bug reports and suggestions.
Graham Barr The new MailTools.
Achim Bohnet Numerous good suggestions, in; cluding the I/O model.
Kent Boortz Initial code for RFC-1522-decod; ing of MIME headers.
Andreas Koenig Numerous good ideas, tons of be; ta testing,
and help with CPAN-friendly

packaging.; Igor Starovoitov Bug reports and suggestions.
Jason L Tibbitts III Bug reports, suggestions, patch; es.
Not to mention the Accidental Beta Test Team, whose bug reports (and comments) have been invaluable in improving the whole:: Phil Abercrombie
Mike Blazer
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. Bet ter yet, email me, and I'll put you in.

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