MIME::Tools(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation 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 directory:
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(\*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
### 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(\*MAIL);
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 distribution
MIME::Base64
MIME::QuotedPrint
Net::SMTP
Mail::Internet, ... from the MailTools distribution.
See the Makefile.PL in your distribution for the most-comprehensive 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 oe( 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 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 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 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::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 top-level "multipart" entity with
MM:Ett:bid), and then use the similar MM:Ett:atc( 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".
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 standard encodings are supported (see "A MIME PRIMER" for details):
Encoding: | Normally used when message contents are:
-------------------------------------------------------------------7bit ------------------------------------------------------------------7bit
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-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...
Message-logging
MIME-tools is a large and complex toolkit which tries to deal with a wide variety of external input.
It's sometimes 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 prefix 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 suspicious 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 function 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 example, 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, "\n";
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 warning 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 people 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(\*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.
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 warnings/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(\*STDIN);
$entity->print(\*STDOUT);
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 special 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
"untranslateable" characters as "?"s, or to ignore them completely.
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 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.
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.
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.
Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines
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.
Ignoring non-header headers
People like to hand the parser raw messages straight from POP3 or from a mailbox. There is often
predictable non-header 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 fragments both are regarded as having an empty preamble (where "\n" indicates a newline
character):
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="xyz"\n
Subject: This message (#1) has an empty preamble\n
\n
--xyz\n
...
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="xyz"\n
Subject: This message (#2) also has an empty preamble\n
\n
\n
--xyz\n
...
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 message #2, since it fills the role of "the
newline which is only there to make sure that the boundary is at the beginning of a line". Such
newlines are never part of the content preceding the boundary; thus, there is no preamble "content"
in message #2.
However, it seems clear that message #1 also has no preamble "content", and is in fact merely a
compact representation 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 current 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 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.
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 equivalent in MIME:: module terms...
attachment
An "attachment" is common slang for any part of a multipart 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 represented 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
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", "Contenttransfer-encoding",
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.
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 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) David F. Skoll
(dfs@roaringpenguin.com) http://www.roaringpenguin.com
Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 by ZeeGee Software Inc (www.zeegee.com). Copyright (c) 2004 by Roaring
Penguin Software Inc (www.roaringpenguin.com)
All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself. See the COPYING file in the distribution for details.
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: 1.15 $
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.
MM:Tos:moe( made more flexible. You can now override the tmpfile-opening behavior.
Version 5.408 (2000/11/10)
Added new Beta umm( mechanism. See MIME::WordDecoder for full details. Also see "Understand
how international characters are represented".
Version 5.405 (2000/11/05)
Added a pre) 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/directories 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 filenames 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 MM:Ett:pit_bd(. 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-
generated 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 consistent. For details, see "Message-logging".
Version 5.312 (2000/09/03)
Fixed a Perl 5.7 slc( 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 otu_pei( 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
suggestion.
Version 5.305 (2000/07/20)
Added MIME::Entity::parts_DFS as convenient way to "get all parts". Thanks to Xavier Armengou
for suggesting 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-
compatible. 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 \w), 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 redundant, 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 pointing 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 pointing 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. Special 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 contributions would be
welcome). NBit encoding is more-conveniently 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 wie) 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 boundary. 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, benchmarking,
and Beta-testing!
Convenient new one-directory-per-message parsing mechanism.
Now through "MIME::Parser" method "output_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.
Parser is more tolerant of weird EOL termination.
Some mailagents are can terminate lines with "\r\r\n".
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, Marius 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 downcasing 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 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 (1998/01/20)
Bug fix:
MIME::ParserBase was accidentally folding newlines in header fields. Thanks to
Jason L. Tibbitts III for spotting this.
Version 4.112 (1998/01/17)
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 (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 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 pit) 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.
MM:Ha:ad) 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 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 "REQUIREMENTS" 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 pre_to) 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.
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. 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 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
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. Better yet, email me, and I'll put you in.
SEE ALSO
At the time of this writing ($Date: 2006/03/17 21:03:23 $), the MIME-tools homepage was
http://www.mimedefang.org/static/mime-tools.php Check there for updates and support.
Users of this toolkit may wish to read the documentation of Mail::Header and Mail::Internet.
The MIME format is documented in RFCs 1521-1522, and more recently in RFCs 2045-2049.
The MIME header format is an outgrowth of the mail header format documented in RFC 822.
perl v5.8.8 2006-03-17 MIME::Tools(3)
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