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<TITLE>MIME-tools</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="sans-serif" SIZE=-1><A HREF="http://www.zeegee.com" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="icons/zeegee.gif" ALT="ZeeGee Software" ALIGN="RIGHT" BORDER="0"></A><A NAME="__TOP__"><H1>MIME-tools</H1>
</A>
<P><B>This module is <FONT COLOR="#990000">BETA</FONT> code, which means that the interfaces are fairly stable BUT it has not been out in the community long enough to guarantee much testing. Use with caution! Please report any errors back to <A HREF="mailto:eryq@zeegee.com">eryq@zeegee.com</A> as soon as you can.</B><UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#NAME">NAME</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#REQUIREMENTS">REQUIREMENTS</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#A_QUICK_TOUR">A QUICK TOUR</A>
<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#Overview_of_the_classes">Overview of the classes</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Parsing_messages">Parsing messages</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Composing_messages">Composing messages</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Sending_email">Sending email</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Encoding_decoding_support">Encoding/decoding support</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Message-logging">Message-logging</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Configuring_the_toolkit">Configuring the toolkit</A>
</UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#THINGS_YOU_SHOULD_DO">THINGS YOU SHOULD DO</A>
<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#Take_a_look_at_the_examples">Take a look at the examples</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Run_with_warnings_enabled">Run with warnings enabled</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Avoid_non-standard_encodings">Avoid non-standard encodings</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Plan_for_thrown_exceptions">Plan for thrown exceptions</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Check_the_parser_results_for_warnings_errors">Check the parser results for warnings/errors</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Don_t_plan_on_printing_exactly_what_you_parsed">Don't plan on printing exactly what you parsed!</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Understand_how_international_characters_are_represented">Understand how international characters are represented</A>
</UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#THINGS_I_DO_THAT_YOU_SHOULD_KNOW_ABOUT">THINGS I DO THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT</A>
<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_on_input">Fuzzing of CRLF and newline on input</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_when_decoding">Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when decoding</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_when_encoding_composing">Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when encoding/composing</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Inability_to_handle_multipart_boundaries_with_embedded_newlines">Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Ignoring_non-header_headers">Ignoring non-header headers</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Fuzzing_of_empty_multipart_preambles">Fuzzing of empty multipart preambles</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Use_of_a_temp_file_during_parsing">Use of a temp file during parsing</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Why_do_I_assume_that_MIME_objects_are_email_objects">Why do I assume that MIME objects are email objects?</A>
</UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#A_MIME_PRIMER">A MIME PRIMER</A>
<UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#Glossary">Glossary</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Content_types">Content types</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#Content_transfer_encodings">Content transfer encodings</A>
</UL>
<LI> <A HREF="#TERMS_AND_CONDITIONS">TERMS AND CONDITIONS</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#SUPPORT">SUPPORT</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#VERSION">VERSION</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#CHANGE_LOG">CHANGE LOG</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#AUTHOR">AUTHOR</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#ACKNOWLEDGMENTS">ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</A>
<LI> <A HREF="#SEE_ALSO">SEE ALSO</A>
</UL>
</A>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="NAME"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> NAME</H2></A>
<P>MIME-tools - modules for parsing (and creating!) MIME entities
<P><HR>
<A NAME="SYNOPSIS"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> SYNOPSIS</H2></A>
<P>Here's some pretty basic code for <B>parsing a MIME message,</B> and outputting
its decoded components to a given directory:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
use MIME::Parser;
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Create parser, and set some parsing options:
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_under("$ENV{HOME}/mimemail");
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Parse input:
$entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Take a look at the top-level entity (and any parts it has):
$entity->dump_skeleton;
</PRE></FONT>
<P>Here's some code which <B>composes and sends a MIME message</B> containing
three parts: a text file, an attached GIF, and some more text:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
use MIME::Entity;
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### 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!");
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Part #1: a simple text document:
$top->attach(Path=>"./testin/short.txt");
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Part #2: a GIF file:
$top->attach(Path => "./docs/mime-sm.gif",
Type => "image/gif",
Encoding => "base64");
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Part #3: some literal text:
$top->attach(Data=>$message);
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
### Send it:
open MAIL, "| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi -oem" or die "open: $!";
$top->print(\*MAIL);
close MAIL;
</PRE></FONT>
<P>For more examples, look at the scripts in the <B>examples</B> directory
of the MIME-tools distribution.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="DESCRIPTION"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> DESCRIPTION</H2></A>
<P>MIME-tools is a collection of Perl5 MIME:: modules for parsing, decoding,
<I>and generating</I> single- or multipart (even nested multipart) MIME
messages. (Yes, kids, that means you can send messages with attached
GIF files).
<P><HR>
<A NAME="REQUIREMENTS"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> REQUIREMENTS</H2></A>
<P>You will need the following installed on your system:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
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.
</PRE></FONT>
<P>See the Makefile.PL in your distribution for the most-comprehensive
list of prerequisite modules and their version numbers.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="A_QUICK_TOUR"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> A QUICK TOUR</H2></A>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Overview_of_the_classes"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Overview of the classes</H3></A>
<P>Here are the classes you'll generally be dealing with directly:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
(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...
</PRE></FONT>
<P>To illustrate, parsing works this way:
<UL>
<P><LI>
<P><B>The "parser" parses the MIME stream.</B>
A parser is an instance of <CODE>MIME::Parser</CODE>.
You hand it an input stream (like a filehandle) to parse a message from:
if the parse is successful, the result is an "entity".
<P><LI>
<P><B>A parsed message is represented by an "entity".</B>
An entity is an instance of <CODE>MIME::Entity</CODE> (a subclass of <CODE>Mail::Internet</CODE>).
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".
<P><LI>
<P><B>The entity's "head" contains information about the message.</B>
A "head" is an instance of <CODE>MIME::Head</CODE> (a subclass of <CODE>Mail::Header</CODE>).
It contains information from the message header: content type,
sender, subject line, etc.
<P><LI>
<P><B>The entity's "body" knows where the message data is.</B>
You can ask to "open" this data source for <I>reading</I> or <I>writing</I>,
and you will get back an "I/O handle".
<P><LI>
<P><B>You can open() a "body" and get an "I/O handle" to read/write message data.</B>
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.
</UL>
<P>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:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
.--------.
| 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"
</PRE></FONT>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Parsing_messages"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Parsing messages</H3></A>
<P>You usually start by creating an instance of <B>MIME::Parser</B>
and setting up certain parsing parameters: what directory to save
extracted files to, how to name the files, etc.
<P>You then give that instance a readable filehandle on which waits a
MIME message. If all goes well, you will get back a <B>MIME::Entity</B>
object (a subclass of <B>Mail::Internet</B>), which consists of...
<UL>
<P><LI>
<P>A <B>MIME::Head</B> (a subclass of <B>Mail::Header</B>) which holds the MIME
header data.
<P><LI>
<P>A <B>MIME::Body</B>, 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 <B>IO::Handle</B> interface.
</UL>
<P>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...).
<P>Internally, the parser (in MIME::Parser) asks for instances
of <B>MIME::Decoder</B> 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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Composing_messages"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Composing messages</H3></A>
<P>All message composition is done via the <B>MIME::Entity</B> class.
For single-part messages, you can use the <B>MIME::Entity/build</B>
constructor to create MIME entities very easily.
<P>For multipart messages, you can start by creating a top-level
<CODE>multipart</CODE> entity with <B>MIME::Entity::build()</B>, and then use
the similar <B>MIME::Entity::attach()</B> method to attach parts to
that message. <I>Please note:</I> what most people think of as
"a text message with an attached GIF file" is <I>really</I> a multipart
message with 2 parts: the first being the text message, and the
second being the GIF file.
<P>When building MIME a entity, you'll have to provide two very important
pieces of information: the <I>content type</I> and the
<I>content transfer encoding</I>. The type is usually easy, as it is directly
determined by the file format; e.g., an HTML file is <CODE>text/html</CODE>.
The encoding, however, is trickier... for example, some HTML files are
<CODE>7bit</CODE>-compliant, but others might have very long lines and would need to be
sent <CODE>quoted-printable</CODE> for reliability.
<P>See the section on encoding/decoding for more details, as well as
<A HREF="#A_MIME_PRIMER">A MIME PRIMER</A>.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Sending_email"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Sending email</H3></A>
<P>Since MIME::Entity inherits directly from Mail::Internet,
you can use the normal Mail::Internet mechanisms to send
email. For example,
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
$entity->smtpsend;
</PRE></FONT>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Encoding_decoding_support"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Encoding/decoding support</H3></A>
<P>The <B>MIME::Decoder</B> class can be used to <I>encode</I> as well; this is done
when printing MIME entities. All the standard encodings are supported
(see <A HREF="#A_MIME_PRIMER">A MIME PRIMER</A> for details):
<P><TABLE CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=0 BORDER=1 ALIGN=CENTER BGCOLOR=#EEEEEE><TR><TH BGCOLOR=#AA0055 ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#FFFFFF FACE="sans-serif">Encoding: </FONT></TH BGCOLOR=#AA0055><TH BGCOLOR=#AA0055 ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#FFFFFF FACE="sans-serif">Normally used when message contents are: </FONT></TH BGCOLOR=#AA0055></TR><TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">7bit</FONT></TD><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">7-bit data with under 1000 chars/line, or multipart.</FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">8bit</FONT></TD><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">8-bit data with under 1000 chars/line.</FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">binary</FONT></TD><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">8-bit data with some long lines (or no line breaks).</FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">quoted-printable</FONT></TD><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">Text files with some 8-bit chars (e.g., Latin-1 text).</FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">base64</FONT></TD><TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=2 COLOR=#000000 FACE="sans-serif">Binary files.</FONT></TD></TR></TABLE>
<P>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.
<P>In general, only <CODE>quoted-printable</CODE> and <CODE>base64</CODE> 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.
<P>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...
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Message-logging"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Message-logging</H3></A>
<P>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:
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Debug_messages">Debug messages</A></B></DT>
<DD>
These are printed directly to the STDERR, with a prefix of
<CODE>"MIME-tools: debug"</CODE>.
<P>Debug message are only logged if you have turned
<A HREF="#item:debugging">debugging</A> on in the MIME::Tools configuration.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Warning_messages">Warning messages</A></B></DT>
<DD>
These are logged by the standard Perl warn() mechanism
to indicate an unusual situation.
They all have a prefix of <CODE>"MIME-tools: warning"</CODE>.
<P>Warning messages are only logged if <CODE>$^W</CODE> is set true
and MIME::Tools is not configured to be <A HREF="#item:quiet">quiet</A>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Error_messages">Error messages</A></B></DT>
<DD>
These are logged by the standard Perl warn() mechanism
to indicate that something actually failed.
They all have a prefix of <CODE>"MIME-tools: error"</CODE>.
<P>Error messages are only logged if <CODE>$^W</CODE> is set true
and MIME::Tools is not configured to be <A HREF="#item:quiet">quiet</A>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Usage_messages">Usage messages</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Unlike "typical" warnings above, which warn about problems processing
data, usage-warnings are for alerting developers of deprecated methods
and suspicious invocations.
<P>Usage messages are currently only logged if <CODE>$^W</CODE> is set true
and MIME::Tools is not configured to be <A HREF="#item:quiet">quiet</A>.
</DL>
<P>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 <B>MIME::Parser::Results</B> object
immediately before invoking the appropriate function above.
That means each parsing run has its own trace-log which
can be examined for problems.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Configuring_the_toolkit"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Configuring the toolkit</H3></A>
<P>If you want to tweak the way this toolkit works (for example, to
turn on debugging), use the routines in the <B>MIME::Tools</B> module.
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:debugging">debugging</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Turn debugging on or off.
Default is false (off).
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
MIME::Tools->debugging(1);
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:quiet">quiet</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Turn the reporting of warning/error messages on or off.
Default is true, meaning that these message are silenced.
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
MIME::Tools->quiet(1);
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:version">version</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Return the toolkit version.
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
print MIME::Tools->version, "\n";
</PRE></FONT>
</DL>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="THINGS_YOU_SHOULD_DO"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> THINGS YOU SHOULD DO</H2></A>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Take_a_look_at_the_examples"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Take a look at the examples</H3></A>
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Run_with_warnings_enabled"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Run with warnings enabled</H3></A>
<P><I>Always</I> run your Perl script with <CODE>-w</CODE>.
If you see a warning about a deprecated method, change your
code ASAP. This will ease upgrades tremendously.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Avoid_non-standard_encodings"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Avoid non-standard encodings</H3></A>
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Plan_for_thrown_exceptions"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Plan for thrown exceptions</H3></A>
<P>For example, if your mail-handling code absolutely must not die,
then perform mail parsing like this:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
$entity = eval { $parser->parse(\*INPUT) };
</PRE></FONT>
<P>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 <I>catching</I> possible exceptions
instead of asking me to propagate <CODE>undef</CODE> 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 <CODE>eval{}</CODE> is good for.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Check_the_parser_results_for_warnings_errors"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Check the parser results for warnings/errors</H3></A>
<P>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 <A HREF="../MIME/Parser/Results.pm.html">MIME::Parser::Results</A>).
Look at that object after each parse.
Print out the warnings and errors, <I>especially</I> if messages don't
parse the way you thought they would.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Don_t_plan_on_printing_exactly_what_you_parsed"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Don't plan on printing exactly what you parsed!</H3></A>
<P><I>Parsing is a (slightly) lossy operation.</I>
Because of things like ambiguities in base64-encoding, the following
is <I>not</I> going to spit out its input unchanged in all cases:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
$entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN);
$entity->print(\*STDOUT);
</PRE></FONT>
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Understand_how_international_characters_are_represented"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Understand how international characters are represented</H3></A>
<P>The MIME standard allows for text strings in headers to contain
characters from any character set, by using special sequences
which look like this:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?=
</PRE></FONT>
<P>To be consistent with the existing Mail::Field classes, MIME::Tools
does <I>not</I> automatically unencode these strings, since doing so would
lose the character-set information and interfere with the parsing
of fields (see <A HREF="../MIME/Parser.pm.html#item:decode_headers">decode_headers</A> for a full explanation).
That means you should be prepared to deal with these encoded strings.
<P>The most common question then is, <B>how do I decode these encoded strings?</B>
The answer depends on what you want to decode them <I>to</I>:
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.
<P>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 <A HREF="../MIME/WordDecoder.pm.html">MIME::WordDecoder</A>).
The simplest way is by using <CODE>unmime()</CODE>, a function wrapped
around your "default" decoder, as follows:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
use MIME::WordDecoder;
...
$subject = unmime $entity->head->get('subject');
</PRE></FONT>
<P>One place this <I>is</I> 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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="THINGS_I_DO_THAT_YOU_SHOULD_KNOW_ABOUT"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> THINGS I DO THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT</H2></A>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_on_input"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Fuzzing of CRLF and newline on input</H3></A>
<P>RFC-1521 dictates that MIME streams have lines terminated by CRLF
(<CODE>"\r\n"</CODE>). However, it is extremely likely that folks will want to
parse MIME streams where each line ends in the local newline
character <CODE>"\n"</CODE> instead.
<P>An attempt has been made to allow the parser to handle both CRLF
and newline-terminated input.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_when_decoding"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when decoding</H3></A>
<P>The <CODE>"7bit"</CODE> and <CODE>"8bit"</CODE> decoders will decode both
a <CODE>"\n"</CODE> and a <CODE>"\r\n"</CODE> end-of-line sequence into a <CODE>"\n"</CODE>.
<P>The <CODE>"binary"</CODE> 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... <I>but this is as it should be</I>.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Fuzzing_of_CRLF_and_newline_when_encoding_composing"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when encoding/composing</H3></A>
<P>All encoders currently output the end-of-line sequence as a <CODE>"\n"</CODE>,
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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Inability_to_handle_multipart_boundaries_with_embedded_newlines"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines</H3></A>
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Ignoring_non-header_headers"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Ignoring non-header headers</H3></A>
<P>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:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
From - Wed Mar 22 02:13:18 2000
Return-Path: <eryq@zeegee.com>
Subject: Hello
</PRE></FONT>
<P>The parser simply ignores such stuff quietly. Perhaps it
shouldn't, but most people seem to want that behavior.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Fuzzing_of_empty_multipart_preambles"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Fuzzing of empty multipart preambles</H3></A>
<P>Please note that there is currently an ambiguity in the way
preambles are parsed in. The following message fragments <I>both</I>
are regarded as having an empty preamble (where <CODE>\n</CODE> indicates a
newline character):
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
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
...
</PRE></FONT>
<P>In both cases, the <I>first</I> completely-empty line (after the "Subject")
marks the end of the header.
<P>But we should clearly ignore the <I>second</I> empty line in message #2,
since it fills the role of <I>"the newline which is only there to make
sure that the boundary is at the beginning of a line"</I>.
Such newlines are <I>never</I> part of the content preceding the boundary;
thus, there is no preamble "content" in message #2.
<P>However, it seems clear that message #1 <I>also</I> has no preamble
"content", and is in fact merely a compact representation of an
empty preamble.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Use_of_a_temp_file_during_parsing"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Use of a temp file during parsing</H3></A>
<P><I>Why not do everything in core?</I>
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.
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Why_do_I_assume_that_MIME_objects_are_email_objects"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Why do I assume that MIME objects are email objects?</H3></A>
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>When I originally wrote these modules for the CPAN, I agonized for a long
time about whether or not they really should subclass from <B>Mail::Internet</B>
(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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="A_MIME_PRIMER"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> A MIME PRIMER</H2></A>
<P>So you need to parse (or create) MIME, but you're not quite up on
the specifics? No problem...
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Glossary"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Glossary</H3></A>
<P>Here are some definitions adapted from RFC-1521 explaining the terminology
we use; each is accompanied by the equivalent in MIME:: module terms...
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:attachment">attachment</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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.").
<P>In our system, an attachment is just a <B>MIME::Entity</B> under the
top-level entity, probably one of its <A HREF="../MIME/Entity.pm.html#item:parts">parts</A>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:body">body</A></B></DT>
<DD>
The "body" of an <A HREF="#item:entity">entity</A> is that portion of the entity
which follows the <A HREF="#item:header">header</A> 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.
<P>A body is represented by an instance of <B>MIME::Body</B>. You get the
body of an entity by sending it a <A HREF="../MIME/Entity.pm.html#item:bodyhandle">bodyhandle()</A>
message.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:body_part">body part</A></B></DT>
<DD>
One of the parts of the body of a multipart <B>/entity</B>.
A body part has a <B>/header</B> and a <B>/body</B>, so it makes sense to
speak about the body of a body part.
<P>Since a body part is just a kind of entity, it's represented by
an instance of <B>MIME::Entity</B>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:entity">entity</A></B></DT>
<DD>
An "entity" means either a <B>/message</B> or a <B>/body part</B>.
All entities have a <B>/header</B> and a <B>/body</B>.
<P>An entity is represented by an instance of <B>MIME::Entity</B>.
There are instance methods for recovering the
<A HREF="../MIME/Entity.pm.html#item:head">header</A> (a <B>MIME::Head</B>) and the
<A HREF="../MIME/Entity.pm.html#item:bodyhandle">body</A> (a <B>MIME::Body</B>).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:header">header</A></B></DT>
<DD>
This is the top portion of the MIME message, which contains the
"Content-type", "Content-transfer-encoding", etc. Every MIME entity has
a header, represented by an instance of <B>MIME::Head</B>. You get the
header of an entity by sending it a head() message.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:message">message</A></B></DT>
<DD>
A "message" generally means the complete (or "top-level") message being
transferred on a network.
<P>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 <B>MIME::Entity</B> returned by the
<B>MIME::Parser</B> as representing the full message.
</DL>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Content_types"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Content types</H3></A>
<P>This indicates what kind of data is in the MIME message, usually
as <I>majortype/minortype</I>. The standard major types are shown below.
A more-comprehensive listing may be found in RFC-2046.
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:application">application</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Data which does not fit in any of the other categories, particularly
data to be processed by some type of application program.
<CODE>application/octet-stream</CODE>, <CODE>application/gzip</CODE>, <CODE>application/postscript</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:audio">audio</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Audio data.
<CODE>audio/basic</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:image">image</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Graphics data.
<CODE>image/gif</CODE>, <CODE>image/jpeg</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:message">message</A></B></DT>
<DD>
A message, usually another mail or MIME message.
<CODE>message/rfc822</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:multipart">multipart</A></B></DT>
<DD>
A message containing other messages.
<CODE>multipart/mixed</CODE>, <CODE>multipart/alternative</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:text">text</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Textual data, meant for humans to read.
<CODE>text/plain</CODE>, <CODE>text/html</CODE>...
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:video">video</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Video or video+audio data.
<CODE>video/mpeg</CODE>...
</DL>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="Content_transfer_encodings"><H3><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h2bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> Content transfer encodings</H3></A>
<P>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.
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:7bit">7bit</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:8bit">8bit</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:binary">binary</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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 <I>least</I> likely to get through mail
gateways.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:base64">base64</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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.).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:quoted-printable">quoted-printable</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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).
</DL>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="TERMS_AND_CONDITIONS"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> TERMS AND CONDITIONS</H2></A>
<P>Eryq (<I><FILE><A HREF="mailto:eryq@zeegee.com">eryq@zeegee.com</A></FILE></I>), ZeeGee Software Inc (<I><FILE><A HREF="http://www.zeegee.com">http://www.zeegee.com</A></FILE></I>).
<P>Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 by ZeeGee Software Inc (www.zeegee.com).
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="SUPPORT"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> SUPPORT</H2></A>
<P>Please email me directly with questions/problems (see AUTHOR below).
<P>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 <I>before</I> they become problems...
<P><HR>
<A NAME="VERSION"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> VERSION</H2></A>
<P>$Revision: 5.411 $
<P><HR>
<A NAME="CHANGE_LOG"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> CHANGE LOG</H2></A>
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.411</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Regenerated docs.</B>
Bug in HTML docs, now all fixed.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.410 (2000/11/23)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Better detection of evil filenames.</B>
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.
<I>Thanks to Jason Haar for the suggestion.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.409 (2000/11/12)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added functionality to MIME::WordDecoder,</B>
including support for plain US-ASCII.
<P><B>MIME::Tools::tmpopen()</B> made more flexible.
You can now override the tmpfile-opening behavior.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.408 (2000/11/10)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added new Beta unmime() mechanism.</B>
See <A HREF="../MIME/WordDecoder.pm.html">MIME::WordDecoder</A> for full details.
Also see <A HREF="#Understand_how_international_characters_are_represented">Understand how international characters are represented</A>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.405 (2000/11/05)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added a purge() that does what people want it to.</B>
Now, when a parse finishes and you want to delete everything that
was created by it, you can invoke <CODE>purge()</CODE> on the parser's filer.
All files/directories created during the last parse should vanish.
<I>Thanks to everyone who complained about MIME::Entity::purge.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.404 (2000/11/04)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added new automatic MIME-decoding of attachment filenames with
encoded (non-ASCII) characters.</B>
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 <A HREF="../MIME/Words.pm.html#item:unmime">unmime</A>.
<P><B>Added tolerance for unquoted =?...?= in param values.</B>
This is in violation of the RFCs, but then, so are some MUAs.
<I>Thanks to desti for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P><B>Fixed supposedly-bad B-encoding.</B>
<I>Thanks to Otto Frost for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.316 (2000/09/21)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Increased tolerance in MIME::Parser.</B>
Now will ignore bogus POP3 "+OK" line before header, as well as bogus
mailbox "From " line (both with warnings).
<I>Thanks to Antony OSullivan (ajos1) for suggesting this feature.</I>
<P><B>Fixed small epilogue-related bug in MIME::Entity::print_body().</B>
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.
<I>Thanks to Lars Hecking for bringing this issue up.</I>
<P><B>Updated documentation.</B>
All module manual pages should now direct readers to the main
MIME-tools manual page.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.314 (2000/09/06)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Fixed Makefile.PL to have less-restrictive requirement
for File::Spec (0.6).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.313 (2000/09/05)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed nasty bug with evil filenames.</B>
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.
<I>Thanks to Julian Field and Antony OSullivan (ajos1)
for delivering the evidence!</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Beware the doctor
who cures seasonal head cold
by killing patient
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Improved naming of extracted files.</B>
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.
<P><B>Simplified message logging and made it more consistent.</B>
For details, see <A HREF="#Message-logging">Message-logging</A>.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.312 (2000/09/03)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed a Perl 5.7 select() incompatibility</B>
which caused "make test" to fail.
<I>Thanks to Nick Ing-Simmons for the patch.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.311 (2000/08/16)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Blind fix for Win32 uudecoding bug.</B>
A missing binmode seems to be the culprit here; let's see if this fixes it.
<I>Thanks to ajos1 for finding the culprit!</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
The carriage return
thumbs its nose at me, laughing:
DOS I/O *still* sucks
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.310 (2000/08/15)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed a bug in the back-compat output_prefix() method of MIME::Parser.</B>
Basically, output prefixes were not being set through this mechanism.
<I>Thanks to ajos1 for the alert.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
shift @_, ### "shift at-underscore"
or @_ will have
bogus "self" object
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Added some backcompat methods,</B> like parse_FH().
<I>Thanks (and apologies) to Alain Kotoujansky.</I>
<P><B>Added filenames-with-spaces support to MIME::Decoder::UU.</B>
<I>Thanks to Richard Pun for the suggestion.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.305 (2000/07/20)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added MIME::Entity::parts_DFS</B> as convenient way to "get all parts".
<I>Thanks to Xavier Armengou for suggesting this method.</I>
<P>Removed the Alpha notice.
Still a few features to tweak, but those will be minor.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.303 (2000/07/07)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed output bugs in new Filers</B>.
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. <CODE>:-(</CODE>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Errors, like beetles,
Multiply ferociously
In the small hours
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.301 (2000/07/06)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>READ ME BEFORE UPGRADING PAST THIS POINT!</B>
<B>New MIME::Parser::Filer class -- not fully backwards-compatible.</B>
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
<A HREF="../MIME/Parser/Filer.pm.html">MIME::Parser::Filer</A> class.
If you <I>override</I> any of the following in a MIME::Parser subclass,
you will need to change your code accordingly:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
evil_filename
output_dir
output_filename
output_path
output_prefix
output_under
</PRE></FONT>
<P>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.
<I>Thanks to Tyson Ackland for all the ideas.</I>
Incidentally, the new code also fixes a bug where identically-named
files in the same message could clobber each other.
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
A message arrives:
"Here are three files, all named 'Foo'"
Only one survives. :-(
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Fixed bug in MIME::Words header decoding.</B>
Underscores were not being handled properly.
<I>Thanks to Dominique Unruh and Doru Petrescu,</I> who independently
submitted the same fix within 2 hours of each other, after this
bug has lain dormant for months:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Two users, same bug,
same patch -- mere hours apart:
Truly, life is odd.
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Removed escaping of underscore in regexps.</B>
Escaping the underscore (\_) in regexps was sloppy and wrong
(escaped metacharacters may include anything in \w), and the newest
Perls warn about it.
<I>Thanks to David Dyck for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
What, then, is a word?
Some letters, digits, and, yes:
Underscores as well
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Added Force option to MIME::Entity's make_multipart</B>.
<I>Thanks to Bob Glickstein for suggesting this.</I>
<P><B>Numerous fixlets to example code.</B>
<I>Thanks to Doru Petrescu for these.</I>
<P><B>Added REQUIREMENTS section in docs.</B>
Long-overdue. <I>Thanks to Ingo Schmiegel for motivating this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.211 (2000/06/24)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed auto-uudecode bug.</B>
Parser was failing with "part did not end with expected boundary" error
when uuencoded entity was a <I>singlepart</I> message (ironically,
uuencoded parts of multiparts worked fine).
<I>Thanks to Michael Mohlere for testing uudecode and finding this.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
The hurrying bee
Flies far for nectar, missing
The nearest flowers
</PRE></FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Say ten thousand times:
Complex cases may succeed
Where simple ones fail
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Parse errors now generate warnings.</B>
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.
<P><B>Miscellaneous cleanup.</B>
Documentation of MIME::Parser improved slightly, and a redundant
warning was removed.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.210 (2000/06/20)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Change in "evil" filename.</B>
Made MIME::Parser's evil_filename stricter by having it reject
"path" characters: any of '/' '\' ':' '[' ']'.
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Just as with beauty
The eye of the beholder
Is where "evil" lives.
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Documentation fixes.</B>
Corrected a number of docs in MIME::Entity which were obsoleted
in the transition from 4.x to 5.x.
<I>Thanks to Michael Fischer for pointing these out.</I>
For this one, a special 5-5-5-5 Haiku of anagrams:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Documentation
in mutant code, O!
Edit -- no, CUT! [moan]
I meant to un-doc...
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>IO::Lines usage bug fixed.</B>
MIME::Entity was missing a "use IO::Lines", which caused an
exception when you tried to use the body() method of MIME::Entity.
<I>Thanks to Hideyo Imazu and Michael Fischer for pointing this out.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Bareword looks fine, but
Perl cries: "Whoa there... IO::Lines?
Never heard of it."
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.209 (2000/06/10)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Autodetection of uuencode.</B>
You can now tell the parser to hunt for uuencode inside what should
be text parts.
See <A HREF="../MIME/Parser.pm.html#item:extract_uuencode">extract_uuencode()</A> for full details.
<B>Beware:</B> this is largely untested at the moment.
<I>Special thanks to Michael Mohlere at ADJE Webmail, who was the
first -- and most-insistent -- user to request this feature.</I>
<P><B>Faster parsing.</B>
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.
<P><B>Better use of core.</B>
MIME::Body::InCore is now used when you build() an entity with
the Data parameter, instead of MIME::Body::Scalar.
<P><B>More documentation</B> on toolkit configuration.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.207 (2000/06/09)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed whine() bug in MIME::Parser</B> where the "warning" method
whine() was called as a static function instead of invoked as an
instance method.
<I>Thanks to Todd A. Bradfute for reporting this.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
A simple warning
Invokes method as function:
"Warning" makes us die
</PRE></FONT>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.206 (2000/06/08)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Ahem. Cough cough:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Way too many bugs
Thus, a self-imposed penance:
Write haiku for each
</PRE></FONT>
<P><B>Fixed bug in MIME::Parser:</B> the reader was not handling the odd
(but legal) case where a multipart boundary is followed by linear
whitespace.
<I>Thanks to Jon Agnew for reporting this with the RFC citation.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Legal message fails
And 'round the globe, thousands cry:
READ THE RFC
</PRE></FONT>
<P>Empty preambles are now handled properly by MIME::Entity when
printing: there is now no space between the header-terminator
and the initial boundary.
<I>Thanks to "sen_ml" for suggesting this.</I>
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
Nature hates vacuum
But please refrain from tossing
Newlines in the void
</PRE></FONT>
<P>Started using Benchmark for benchmarking.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.205 (2000/06/06)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Added terminating newline to all parser messages, and fixed
small parser bug that was dropping parts when errors occurred
in certain places.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.203 (2000/06/05)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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.
<P>MIME::Parser now has ignore_errors() set true by default.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.116 (2000/05/26)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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. <I>Thanks to Jonathan Cohn for reporting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.115 (2000/05/24)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Fixed Ref.t bug, and documented how to remove parts from a MIME::Entity.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.114 (2000/05/23)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Entity now uses MIME::Lite-style default suggested encoding.
<P>More regression test have been added, and the "Size" tests in
Ref.t are skipped for text document (due to CRLF differences
between platforms).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 5.113 (2000/05/21)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Major speed and structural improvements to the parser.</B>
<I>Major, MAJOR thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn, Jeremy Gilbert,
and Doru Petrescu for all the patches, benchmarking,
and Beta-testing!</I>
<P><B>Convenient new one-directory-per-message parsing mechanism.</B>
Now through <CODE>MIME::Parser</CODE> method <CODE>output_under()</CODE>,
you can tell the parser that you want it to create
a unique directory for each message parsed, to hold the
resulting parts.
<P><B>Elimination of $', $` and $&.</B>
Wow... I still can't believe I missed this. D'OH!
<I>Thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn for all his patches.</I>
<P><B>Parser is more tolerant of weird EOL termination.</B>
Some mailagents are can terminate lines with "\r\r\n".
We're okay with that now when we extract the header.
<I>Thanks to Joao Fonseca for pointing this out.</I>
<P><B>Parser is tolerant of "From " lines in headers.</B>
<I>Thanks to Joachim Wieland, Anthony Hinsinger, Marius Stan,
and numerous others.</I>
<P><B>Parser catches syntax errors in headers.</B>
<I>Thanks to Russell P. Sutherland for catching this.</I>
<P><B>Parser no longer warns when subtype is undefined.</B>
<I>Thanks to Eric-Olivier Le Bigot for his fix.</I>
<P><B>Better integration with Mail::Internet.</B>
For example, smtpsend() should work fine.
<I>Thanks to Michael Fischer and others for the patch.</I>
<P><B>Miscellaneous cleanup.</B>
<I>Thanks to Marcus Brinkmann for additional helpful input.</I>
<I>Thanks to Klaus Seidenfaden for good feedback on 5.x Alpha!</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.123 (1999/05/12)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Cleaned up some of the tests for non-Unix OS'es.
Will require a few iterations, no doubt.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.122 (1999/02/09)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Resolved CORE::open warnings for 5.005.</B>
<I>Thanks to several folks for this bug report.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.121 (1998/06/03)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed MIME::Words infinite recursion.</B>
<I>Thanks to several folks for this bug report.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.117 (1998/05/01)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Nicer MIME::Entity::build.</B>
No longer outputs warnings with undefined Filename, and now
accepts Charset as well.
<I>Thanks to Jason Tibbits III for the inspirational patch.</I>
<P><B>Documentation fixes.</B>
Hopefully we've seen the last of the pod2man warnings...
<P><B>Better test logging.</B>
Now uses ExtUtils::TBone.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.116 (1998/02/14)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Bug fix:</B>
MIME::Head and MIME::Entity were not downcasing the
content-type as they claimed. This has now been fixed.
<I>Thanks to Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira for finding this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.114 (1998/02/12)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Gzip64-encoding has been improved, and turned off as a default,</B>
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.
<I>Thanks to Paul J. Schinder for finding this bug.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.113 (1998/01/20)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Bug fix:</B>
MIME::ParserBase was accidentally folding newlines in header fields.
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for spotting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.112 (1998/01/17)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>MIME::Entity::print_body now recurses</B> 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.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.111 (1998/01/14)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Clean build/test on Win95 using 5.004. Whew.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.110 (1998/01/11)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added</B> make_multipart() and make_singlepart() in MIME::Entity.
<P><B>Improved</B> handling/saving of preamble/epilogue.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 4.109 (1998/01/10)</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Overall">Overall</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Major version shift to 4.x</B>
accompanies numerous structural changes, and
the deletion of some long-deprecated code. Many apologies to those
who are inconvenienced by the upgrade.
<P><B>MIME::IO deprecated.</B>
You'll see IO::Scalar, IO::ScalarArray, and IO::Wrap
to make this toolkit work.
<P><B>MIME::Entity deep code.</B>
You can now deep-copy MIME entities (except for on-disk data files).
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Encoding_decoding">Encoding/decoding</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>MIME::Latin1 deprecated, and 8-to-7 mapping removed.</B>
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. <I>But use quoted-printable for your 8-bit
documents; that's what it's there for!</I>
<P><B>7bit and 8bit "encoders" no longer encode.</B>
As per RFC-2045, these just do a pass-through of the data,
but they'll warn you if you send bad data through.
<P><B>MIME::Entity suggests encoding.</B>
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.
<P><B>New module structure for MIME::Decoder classes.</B>
It should be easier for you to see what's happening.
<P><B>New MIME decoders!</B>
Support added for decoding <CODE>x-uuencode</CODE>, and for
decoding/encoding <CODE>x-gzip64</CODE>. You'll need "gzip" to make
the latter work.
<P><B>Quoted-printable back on track... and then some.</B>
The 'quoted-printable' decoder now uses the newest MIME::QuotedPrint,
and amends its output with guideline #8 from RFC2049 (From/.).
<I>Thanks to Denis N. Antonioli for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Parsing">Parsing</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Preamble and epilogue are now saved.</B>
These are saved in the parsed entities as simple
string-arrays, and are output by print() if there.
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.</I>
<P><B>The "multipart/digest" semantics are now preserved.</B>
Parts of digest messages have their mime_type() defaulted
to "message/rfc822" instead of "text/plain", as per the RFC.
<I>Thanks to Carsten Heyl for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Output">Output</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Well-defined, more-complete print() output.</B>
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.
<P><B>You can prevent recommended filenames from being output.</B>
This possible security hole has been plugged; when building MIME
entities, you can specify a body path but suppress the filename
in the header.
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Bug_fixes">Bug fixes</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Win32 installations should work.</B>
The binmode() calls should work fine on Win32 now.
<I>Thanks to numerous folks for their patches.</I>
<P><B>MIME::Head::add()</B> now no longer downcases its argument.
<I>Thanks to Brandon Browning & Jason L. Tibbitts for finding this bug.</I>
</DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 3.204</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Bug in MIME::Head::original_text fixed.</B>
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.
<I>Thanks, as usual, to Andreas Koenig for spotting this one.</I>
<P><B>MIME::ParserBase no longer defaults to RFC-1522-decoding headers.</B>
The documentation correctly stated that the default setting was
to <I>not</I> 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.
<P><B>MIME::ParserBase::parse_nested_messages reexamined.</B>
If you use this feature, please re-read the documentation.
It explains a little more precisely what the ramifications are.
<P><B>MIME::Entity tries harder to ensure MIME compliance.</B>
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
<I>try</I> to protect you from mistakes.
<P><B>The "make" now halts if you don't have the right stuff,</B>
provided your MakeMaker supports PREREQ_PM. See <A HREF="#REQUIREMENTS">REQUIREMENTS</A>
for what you need to install this package. I still provide
old courtesy copies of the MIME:: decoding modules.
<I>Thanks to Hugo van der Sanden for suggesting this.</I>
<P><B>The "make test" is far less chatty.</B>
Okay, okay, STDERR is evil. Now a <CODE>"make test"</CODE> will just give you
the important stuff: do a <CODE>"make test TEST_VERBOSE=1"</CODE> if you want
the gory details (advisable if sending me a bug report).
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 3.203</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>No, there haven't been any major changes between 2.x and 3.x.</B>
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.
<P><B>You can now parse a MIME message from a scalar,</B>
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.
<I>Thanks to fellow Chicagoan Tim Pierce (and countless others)
for asking.</I>
<P><B>More sensible toolkit configuration.</B>
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.
<P><B>You can now sign messages</B> just like in Mail::Internet.
See MIME::Entity for the interface.
<P><B>You can now remove signatures from messages</B> just like in Mail::Internet.
See MIME::Entity for the interface.
<P><B>You can now compute/strip content lengths</B>
and other non-standard MIME fields.
See sync_headers() in MIME::Entity.
<I>Thanks to Tim Pierce for bringing the basic problem to my attention.</I>
<P><B>Many warnings are now silent unless $^W is true.</B>
That means unless you run your Perl with <CODE>-w</CODE>, you won't see
deprecation warnings, non-fatal-error messages, etc.
But of course you run with <CODE>-w</CODE>, so this doesn't affect you. <CODE>:-)</CODE>
<P><B>Completed the 7-bit encodings in MIME::Latin1.</B>
We hadn't had complete coverage in the conversion from 8- to 7-bit;
now we do. <I>Thanks to Rolf Nelson for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P><B>Fixed broken parse_two() in MIME::ParserBase.</B>
BTW, if your code worked with the "broken" code, it should <I>still</I>
work.
<I>Thanks again to Tim Pierce for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.14</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Just a few bug fixes to improve compatibility with Mail-Tools 1.08,
and with the upcoming Perl 5.004 release.
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for reporting the problems so quickly.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.13</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:New_features">New features</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Added RFC-1522-style decoding of encoded header fields.</B>
Header decoding can now be done automatically during parsing via the
new <CODE>decode()</CODE> method in MIME::Head... just tell your parser
object that you want to <CODE>decode_headers()</CODE>.
<I>Thanks to Kent Boortz for providing the idea, and the baseline
RFC-1522-decoding code!</I>
<P><B>Building MIME messages is even easier.</B>
Now, when you use MIME::Entity's <CODE>build()</CODE> or <CODE>attach()</CODE>,
you can also supply individual
mail headers to set (e.g., <CODE>-Subject</CODE>, <CODE>-From</CODE>, <CODE>-To</CODE>).
<P>Added <CODE>Disposition</CODE> to MIME::Entity's <CODE>build()</CODE> method.
<I>Thanks to Kurt Freytag for suggesting this feature.</I>
<P>An <CODE>X-Mailer</CODE> 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.
<P>Added <CODE>purge()</CODE> method to MIME::Entity for deleteing leftover files.
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for suggesting this feature.</I>
<P>Added <CODE>seek()</CODE> and <CODE>tell()</CODE> methods to built-in MIME::IO classes.
Only guaranteed to work when reading!
<I>Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for suggesting this feature.</I>
<P>When parsing a multipart message with apparently no boundaries,
the error message you get has been improved.
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Bug_fixes">Bug fixes</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Patched over a Perl 5.002 (and maybe earlier and later) bug involving
FileHandle::new_tmpfile.</B> 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.
<I>Thanks to Dragomir R. Radev and Zyx for reporting the weird behavior
that led to the discovery of this bug.</I>
<P>MIME::Entity's <CODE>build()</CODE> method now warns you if you give it an illegal
boundary string, and substitutes one of its own.
<P>MIME::Entity's <CODE>build()</CODE> method now generates safer, fully-RFC-1521-compliant
boundary strings.
<P>Bug in MIME::Decoder's <CODE>install()</CODE> method was fixed.
<I>Thanks to Rolf Nelson and Nickolay Saukh for finding this.</I>
<P>Changed FileHandle::new_tmpfile to FileHandle->new_tmpfile, so some
Perl installations will be happier.
<I>Thanks to Larry W. Virden for finding this bug.</I>
<P>Gave <CODE>=over</CODE> an arg of 4 in all PODs.
<I>Thanks to Larry W. Virden for pointing out the problems of bare =over's</I>
</DL>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.04</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>A bug in MIME::Entity's output method was corrected.</B>
MIME::Entity::print now outputs everything to the desired filehandle
explicitly.
<I>Thanks to Jake Morrison for pointing out the incompatibility
with Mail::Header.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.03</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Fixed bug in autogenerated filenames</B> 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!)
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P>Fixed bug in MIME::Entity::body() where it was using the bodyhandle
completely incorrectly.
<I>Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P>Fixed MIME::Head::VERSION so CPAN:: is happier.
<I>Thanks to Larry Virden for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P>Fixed undefined-variable warnings when dumping skeleton
(happened when there was no Subject: line)
<I>Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to my attention.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.02</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Stupid, stupid bugs in both BASE64 encoding and decoding were fixed.</B>
<I>Thanks to Phil Abercrombie for locating them.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 2.01</A></B></DT>
<DD>
<B>Modules now inherit from the new Mail:: modules!</B>
This means big changes in behavior.
<P><B>MIME::Parser can now store message data in-core.</B>
There were a <I>lot</I> of requests for this feature.
<P><B>MIME::Entity can now compose messages.</B>
There were a <I>lot</I> of requests for this feature.
<P>Added option to parse <CODE>"message/rfc822"</CODE> as a pseduo-multipart document.
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.13</A></B></DT>
<DD>
MIME::Head now no longer requires space after ":", although
either a space or a tab after the ":" will be swallowed
if there.
<I>Thanks to Igor Starovoitov for pointing out this shortcoming.</I>
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.12</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Fixed bugs in parser where CRLF-terminated lines were
blowing out the handling of preambles/epilogues.
<I>Thanks to Russell Sutherland for reporting this bug.</I>
<P>Fixed idiotic is_multipart() bug.
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for noticing it.</I>
<P>Added untested binmode() calls to parser for DOS, etc.
systems. No idea if this will work...
<P>Reorganized the output_path() methods to allow easy use
of inheritance, as per Achim Bohnet's suggestion.
<P>Changed MIME::Head to report mime_type more accurately.
<P>POSIX module no longer loaded by Parser if perl >= 5.002.
Hey, 5.001'ers: let me know if this breaks stuff, okay?
<P>Added unsupported ./examples directory.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.11</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Converted over to using Makefile.PL.
<I>Thanks to Andreas Koenig for the much-needed kick in the pants...</I>
<P>Added t/*.t files for testing. Eeeeeeeeeeeh...it's a start.
<P>Fixed bug in default parsing routine for generating
output paths; it was warning about evil filenames if
there simply <I>were</I> no recommended filenames. D'oh!
<P>Fixed redefined parts() method in Entity.
<P>Fixed bugs in Head where field name wasn't being case folded.
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.10</A></B></DT>
<DD>
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.
<I>Thanks to Igor Starovoitov for reporting this bug.</I>
<P>A bad regexp for parameter names was causing
some parameters to be parsed incorrectly; this has also
been fixed.
<I>Thanks again to Igor Starovoitov for reporting this bug.</I>
<P>It is now possible to get full control of the filenaming
algorithm before output files are generated, and the default
algorithm is safer.
<I>Thanks to Laurent Amon for pointing out the problems, and suggesting
some solutions.</I>
<P>Fixed illegal "simple" multipart test file. D'OH!
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.9</A></B></DT>
<DD>
No changes: 1.8 failed CPAN registration
<P><DT><B><A NAME="item:Version">Version 1.8</A></B></DT>
<DD>
Fixed incompatibility with 5.001 and FileHandle::new_tmpfile
Added COPYING file, and improved README.
</DL>
<P><HR>
<A NAME="AUTHOR"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> AUTHOR</H2></A>
<P>MIME-tools was created by:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
___ _ _ _ _ ___ _
/ _ \| '_| | | |/ _ ' / Eryq, (eryq@zeegee.com)
| __/| | | |_| | |_| | President, ZeeGee Software Inc.
\___||_| \__, |\__, |__ http://www.zeegee.com/
|___/ |___/
</PRE></FONT>
<P>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.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="ACKNOWLEDGMENTS"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> ACKNOWLEDGMENTS</H2></A>
<P><B>This kit would not have been possible</B> but for the direct
contributions of the following:
<FONT SIZE=3 FACE="courier"><PRE>
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.
</PRE></FONT>
<P>Not to mention the Accidental Beta Test Team, whose bug reports (and
comments) have been invaluable in improving the whole:
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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
</PRE></FONT>
<P>Please forgive me if I've accidentally left you out.
Better yet, email me, and I'll put you in.
<P><HR>
<A NAME="SEE_ALSO"><H2><A HREF="#__TOP__"><IMG SRC="icons/h1bullet.gif" ALT="Top" BORDER="0"></A> SEE ALSO</H2></A>
<P>At the time of this writing ($Date: 2001/01/17 06:57:21 $), the MIME-tools homepage was
<I><FILE><A HREF="http://www.zeegee.com/code/perl/MIME-tools">http://www.zeegee.com/code/perl/MIME-tools</A></FILE></I>.
Check there for updates and support.
<P>Users of this toolkit may wish to read the documentation of Mail::Header
and Mail::Internet.
<P>The MIME format is documented in RFCs 1521-1522, and more recently
in RFCs 2045-2049.
<P>The MIME header format is an outgrowth of the mail header format
documented in RFC 822.
<P><HR>
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