Email::Abstract

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This article refers to the Perl module Email::Abstract.

Email::Abstract is supposed to provide a generic interface for handling email messages blessed into any of several classes.

The Email::Abstract interface is intentionally minimal, to help ensure that any representation of an email message can be interfaced with Email::Abstract. 

 my $message = MIME::Internet->new(...); # could be one of many classes
 my $abstract = Email::Abstract->new($message);
 my $subject = $abstract->get_header('Subject');
 
 my $mail_message = $abstract->cast('Mail::Message');

The old interface was object-less and looked like this: 

 my $email_simple = Email::Simple->new($text);
 my $subject = Email::Abstract->get_header($email_simple, "Subject");
 
 my $mail_message = Email::Abstract->cast($email_message, "Mail::Message");
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Ideas

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More Universal Methods

A number of useful methods remain to be added:

  • stream_to - steam the message to a filehandle
  • filehandle - provide an fh for the message as string (make sure if you get two, either document that they're synced or make sure they nevrr are)
  • filename - provide a filename for a file containing the message

These came up on #email as things that would be useful when running a series of external analysis programs (virus scanners, etc.) on a message. All of these method could be implemented on top of the existing

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MIME Methods

It would be nice to have a universal way to get at the basics of MIME parts. The methods would probably include:

  • subparts - all the non-top-level parts of the message
  • content_type - the content type of the part in "text/plain" form

This would probably have to be a subclass or mixin. Otherwise, on ends up guessing whether or not the passed-in Email::Simple object is really a MIME message.

Retrieved from "http://emailproject.perl.org/mediawiki/index.php/Email::Abstract"
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