$Id: README,v 1.6 2001/08/26 13:08:15 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

Autoloader:
-----------
Read the Mail::MboxParser::Mail docs for invoking external methods.
The autoloading-mechanism will take care that the below and other things
will work:

	$mail->effective_type; # from MIME::Entity

Methods:
--------

Mail::MboxParser::Base (not to be instantiated)
	::error (error of last operation if any)
	::log (logs internal errors in rare cases)
	
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 (Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Body object)
	::find_body (index number that should be the main-body of email)
	::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)

Mail::MboxParser::Mail::Body
	::new (done internally)
	::signature (signature of the body if any)
	::extract_urls (hash-ref with url and context)
	
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>