How do I remove email headers?

Question

Hello,

I learning Perl and doing a home made project to my family (a subscription project). The Perl application that uses Net::POP3 connect to my mailbox and save all my emails to a file (Mail.txt). When I open this file I see a lot of junk, as below. What i can do to remove this? Thanks.

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Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:09:48 -0400
To: [email protected]
Subject: "What programs would you like to see ported to Linux?" update
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Dear nathanpc,

Answer 1

It's not junk. It's email header. Use, for example, Mail::Message to parse it. Something like this:

my $msg_obj = Mail::Message->read($rawdata); my $body = $msg_obj->body;

Answer 2

You know, I did recommend Mail::POP3Client which abstracts away the details:

Body( MESSAGE_NUMBER )

Get the body of the specified message, either as an array of lines or as a string, depending on context.

BodyToFile( FILE_HANDLE, MESSAGE_NUMBER )

Get the body of the specified message and write it to the given file handle.

Answer 3

Email headers consist of all text up to the first completely blank line. So, if you actually do want to throw them away (rather than using a good module to parse them as the earlier examples suggested), just throw away everything up to and including the first blank line.

If you're looking at an mbox-format mailbox file containing multiple messages, you can identify the start of the next message's headers by looking for a line which starts with the five characters "From " (note the trailing space - this is what distinguishes it from a "From:" header).