On 01/29/12 02:13, Matthew Seaman wrote:
On 28/01/2012 13:39, Da Rock wrote:
I know this is not exactly FreeBSD related, but I'm in need of a monk
that can enlighten me on a sacred incantation to connect perl to an imap
server using Mail::Box modules :) If it helps people sleep, its all
running only on FreeBSD systems...
I have googled and searched, and googled some more, and tested, and then
went back to the drawing board and googled yet again... there is simply
no clear answer out there. All the docs are very disjointed from my
reckoning- with no clear direction that explains how you get from a-b.
I have enabled a connection (I think - based on my tests and logs), but
I cannot get further than that. I have a Mail::Box::Manager
instantiated, and then I have to use Mail::Box::IMAP4 to open a
connection to the server. From there I need to get a list of the folders
available- and thats where I get stymied.
All the docs are pop3 based, or maildir based, or mbox. The imap is very
sketchy... and what is out there says to basically connect, and then
there is a jump to folders and messages with no idea of what is involved
in between. Although I did see one complete example with pop3, but it
won't work for imap.
This is absolutely typical -- IMAP is frequently treated as
POP-with-extra-bits, which really makes no sense whatsoever. There's a
fundamental difference in behaviour to do with where the mail is
actually stored. Anything that works by connecting to an IMAP server
and downloading all the new messages to hold and read locally really is
missing the point.
I think there is a genuine effort to help make it easier to use and to
abstract the backend, but it doesn't seem the coder has a handle on it
themselves. They seem more familiar with filesystem based mail then the
network ones- and then familiarity with pop3 rules. Therefore me, as a
newb, has next to no hope of figuring it out... :/
One of the biggest problems is the username confuses any other module
method than the Mail::Box::IMAP4 - the syntax is user@domain, and so if
I use Mail::Box::Manager it will compile it into a url form ie
imap4://user@domain:password@mail.server which it obviously barfs on and
refuses to look beyond user@domain.
Yeah, IMAP4 doesn't do URL-style things itself, so this is a fiction
invented to appease the higher layers of Mail::Box. Unfortunately, '@'
is of syntactic significance to URL schemes, making it difficult to
incorporate usernames containing it.
Hmmm.... can you substitute a hex encoded character string in that
username? %40 should be the encoding for an @ character.
That could work... I might have a crack at that. I thought pop3 would
have trouble as well, you can use that username structure there too.
I really seem to be missing something fundamental here. I'm only trying
to create some tools which will handle some situations apparently only
local to my systems, and improve my perl foo before I start creating
modules of my own and testing mod_perl.
If someone can help clear this up I'll be happy to communicate off list
if that is necessary.
Is all the e-mail you have to deal with stored on your IMAP4 server? If
so, then using Mail::IMAPClient directly[*] might serve you better
rather than through the Mail::Box and Mail::Transport classes. However,
that's a much lower level interface and you'll need to be fairly au-fait
with RFC 3501. (That's not as bad as it sounds: all it boils down to is
finding what the command is called in the IMAP protocol when you want to
achieve a particular effect.)
Yes... I was dreading that a bit, but it does seem easier. I was hoping
it would be more like Email::Simple, but it doesn't seem to be there
yet. That said, I'll try that trick and see if it works first.
One thing that I notice on a cursory reading of Mail::Box::IMAP4 is that
it seems to assume things about the behaviour of the IMAP message store
which aren't necessarily true for all different IMAP servers. (ICBW --
it was a /very/ cursory reading.) Usernames of the form
'n...@example.com' are one of those things you can do with IMAP which
tend to come as a bit of a surprise to people used to other mailclient
protocols.
It seems to make some assumptions based on common uses, and I believe it
said you can override others; but yes it is also "still under
development" - a note which appears and disappears from time to time :S
Thanks for the help guys. I've stepped away from php for security
reasons; and the fact that I can integrate perl right into apache with
mod_perl.
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