While trying hard long and long hours to write a perl script that can extract attachments from pieces of e-mail, I realized that there were no clear info on the web on how to do, and that if I successed, I would publish that script.
Finally I succeded. That is actually very easy and that is probably why nothing was ever published about it. But, when you are a beginner in Perl (I learned it in 1 week), you normally need a little bit more help. Also, I was not alone in that case and there were a numerous questions on various forum, but without satisfying answers.
As I said, my script is extrimely simple.
It is based on the Mail::IMAPTalk module to establish the IMAP connection and on the MIME::Parser module to parse the mail as a MIME object (given by the first module).
I know there is a dedicated CPAN module to strip attachment : Mail::Attachment::Stripper, but, I could never get it to work and the author did not answer to my e-mail.
You will find the script here with some comments that should explain well :
Of course, that is just a quick and dirty base : it is up to you to improve / correct / extend it to fit your needs. If so, be nice to update me here. 
Comments 14
Thank you for this!
Posted 09 Apr 2008 at 12:17 pm ¶I am trying to accomplish this too and it is indeed hard to find anything to get you on the way
Its really great. I have just one question. If there is SSL authentication required, is there any option to add in this script.
Thanks & Regards,
Posted 16 Mar 2010 at 12:04 pm ¶Nice to see it is useful.
Posted 16 Mar 2010 at 1:33 pm ¶Unfortunately, the script doesn’t support yet SSL, but I will think about it for a future release.
I think it’s useful for me.Thank you for sharing.
Posted 30 Apr 2010 at 10:31 am ¶I have been having the same problem.
Thanks a lot for this.
Yet, I tried it the script breaks when trying to extract the attachment.
“Can’t fetch the message ! at attachment stripper.pl line 36.”
Do you have any tips about what could be the problem?
I’m using this in a Dreamhost server, running locally on the server.
Thanks a lot for the great work you made here!
Posted 23 Sep 2010 at 10:29 pm ¶Bruno
Hmm… It means that it could connect correctly to your mailbox but failed at parsing the message body.
Posted 23 Sep 2010 at 11:45 pm ¶It is difficult to tell what’s wrong without seeing the message structure itself.
Have you tried with other messages?
Hi JC.
I tried with simple emails where the attachment is just a txt file and I tried as well with jpg.
Do you have the time to try it yourself and see if it works?
Thank you in advance.
Posted 28 Sep 2010 at 11:04 am ¶Bruno
Hi,
nice work. Does it work with attachments in a mail sent from an iPhone, because these doesen’t work with most scripts.
Thans
Posted 08 Dec 2010 at 10:37 am ¶Chris
@Bruno: I really don’t have time but I can have a really quick look (5 min), if there is a chance…
@Chris: I haven’t tested it and can’t as I don’t have an iphone.
Posted 06 Feb 2011 at 10:34 am ¶Doesn’t the iphone respect the RFC ?
hello,
i treid to get this trunning under Linux and installed IMAPTalk.pm. Script seems to login but it get stuck with this error message
Connecting to IMAP server at 127.0.0.1:myusername…
Posted 24 Aug 2011 at 10:27 am ¶Please report to rjlov at /lib/Mail/IMAPTalk.pm line 3859.
Warning only: IMAPTalk not using unicode_folders at /lib/Mail/IMAPTalk.pm line 3860
Mail::IMAPTalk::_fix_folder_name(‘Mail::IMAPTalk=HASH(0x83a9ca4)’,'INBOX’) called at /lib/Mail/IMAPTalk.pm line 1168
Mail::IMAPTalk::select(‘Mail::IMAPTalk=HASH(0x83a9ca4)’,'INBOX’) called at ./imap.pl line 31
main::connexion(127.0.0.1,’myusername’,',mypass’,143,’INBOX’) called at ./imap.pl line 96
Please report to rjlov at /lib/Mail/IMAPTalk.pm line 3861.
IMAP connection successful !
mkdir extracted/msg-1314173768-21507-0: No such file or directory
OK i had to mkdir the folder “extracted” on my own. The script works and extracts messages very well. But the error message remains. i could live with it but would like to know what it menas. …
Posted 24 Aug 2011 at 10:55 am ¶Hmm you can safely ignore this warning.
In my script, I specify the use of unicode, for compatibility with most of languages :
use Mail::IMAPTalk qw(:utf8support);
My guess is that your imap folder is not in unicode encoding. Am I correct ?
Posted 26 Aug 2011 at 3:46 pm ¶Yes! it is not unicode. But doesn’t matter. Your script works perfectly for me. Thanks!
Posted 30 Aug 2011 at 5:02 pm ¶I need to strip ALL the new emails with attachments instead of the latest new email. What should I do to process the array of @MsgId (and not $MsgId)?
I also noticed that the script stripped the attachment from the email, but doesn’t flag it “read” afterwards, so if there is no new email come in and you re-run the script, the same email attachment will be extracted again.
Sorry for my noob questions and thanks you in advance for your help!
Posted 02 Nov 2011 at 12:54 am ¶Post a Comment