$Id: README,v 1.4 2001/07/27 18:31:37 parkerpine Exp $

Mail::MboxParser is a module for working with UNIX-flavoured mailboxes. In essence, it is not at all as feature-rich as Mail::Box or Mail::Cclient which has not been intended anyway.
Its purpose is to _easily_ extract messages from a mailbox with _simple_ access to header fields, body and MIME-parts. It is for those people who find the above two module-sets too confusing. See the list of provided methods below.
It is particularly easy to deal with any kind of attached files. See the supplied extract_attachements.pl script for an example. 

Prerequisites:
--------------
Mail::MboxParser depends on MIME::Tools (probably >= 5.0).

Installation:
-------------
Un'tar xfz' the module and 'cd' into the new directory Mail-MboxParser-$VERSION.

Then install:
	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make test
	make install

OO:
---
As from v0.12, Mail::MboxParser can be called 'slightly' object-oriented. 
Mail::MboxParser extends Mail::MboxParser::Base while Mail::MboxParser::Mail 
extends Mail::MboxParser::Base and MIME::Entity. In practice this means that 
you can try to invoke methods from MIME::Entity directly on 
Mail::MboxParser::Mail-objects. I haven't yet tested this thoroughly enough. 
However, the below example should work:

	$mail->effective_type

Some others as well.

Methods:
--------
Mail::MboxParser
	::new (of course)
	::open
	::get_messages (all on array)
	::nmsgs (no of messages in mailbox)
	
Mail::MboxParser::Mail::
	::new (usually internally called by Mail::MboxParser::get_messages)
	::header (hash-ref with all header-fields)
	::body
	::from (hash-ref)
	::to (array of hash-refs)
	::id
	::num_entities (no of MIME-entities)
	::get_entities (array or scalar if called with a number)
	::get_entity_body (body of the n-th entity as single string)
	::store_attachement 
	::store_all_attachements (just save all saveable attachements to filehandle)

Have a look into the eg-directory of the package for some (or one) example(s).
isspam is a little script that reads one mailbox and performs some tests on them. It spits out a number indicating whether this is spam or not. The higher it is, the more likely. Call it like 'isspam -all /home/user/mailbox'.

Contact:
--------
Bugs, feature requests, questions, comments etc. should be directly mailed to me.

Tassilo v. Parseval
<tassilo.parseval@post.rwth-aachen.de>