From: Ed Lau <ted_spam@...>
Date: 2006-06-13T17:13:31+09:00
Subject: Understanding net/imap and multi-part e-mails

Hello:

I would like to use Net::IMAP to connect to an IMAP server and produce a 
list of unread mail messages. For each message, I would like to know 1) 
the sender, 2) the subject and 3) a snippet of the body (i.e., first few 
lines).

I've managed to figure out 1 and 2 (sender and subject) but am stumped 
on 3. For a plain text message, I see that I can do something like this:

  message = imap.fetch(message_id, ["ENVELOPE", "RFC822.TEXT"])[0]
  body = message.attr["RFC822.TEXT"]
  snippet = body[0, 100] # first 100 characters

But what about a multi-part MIME message? I've noticed that by fetching 
BODYSTRUCTURE, I can get the parts of the mail message. Is there a way 
to extract what I want from the BodyTypeText or BodyTypeMultipart 
objects? I've noticed that these objects give the correct size and 
number of lines, etc., but they don't seem to hold the actual plain text 
or HTML content.

I've read the docs a few times, but think that I'm missing something 
fundamental here. How do I use Net::IMAP as-is to do what I want?

Thanks in advance.

--Ed Lau

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