MailBox

• current release
• maintenance
• archive
• examples
• contributors

This page is dedicated to Perl's MailBox suite. MailBox consists of about 160 packages spread over 7 distributions, which together implement powerful methods to handle e-mail in the Perl programming language.

MailBox requires Perl 5.16 (released 2015). Next to this, quite a number of other Perl modules are required, which will be fetched when you install the main distribution.

In the past there was a mailinglist, but it attracted far more spam than serious mail. You can always contact me with questions.

>>> The best documentation.

Development currently takes place in distributions with major version number 4.

• documentation of version 4 on metacpan is equivalent to the manual-pages contained in the release;
• documentation in the form of pure HTML has much finer links, and bundles the related distributions. Browse the version 4 docs in HTML;
• install the latest development release via "cpan Mail::Box";
• sources on github branch master;
• Start with reading the MailBox-Overview and MailBox-Cookbook manual pages.

MailBox version 4 breaks backwards compatibility. Therefore, MailBox version 3 may also still see releases.

• Browse the version 3 docs in HTML;
• In the wiki, you find how to convert from 3 to 4;
• install the latest maintenance release via "cpanm Mail::Box~<4";
• sources on github branch maint3;

All releases, ever:

• CPAN released packages;
• development freezes (OODoc version, better clone github);
• generated html docs;

• The slides of a tutorial presented at YAPC::Europe 2002 contain many examples. It is a good overview if you want to learn MailBox fast. Of course, it only shows an extract of the features.
• The slides of the tutorial at YAPC::Europe 2003 show examples with new features.
• Example scripts are also enclosed in each module. Have a look at the examples/ and scripts/ directories. The examples are small, the scripts are worked-out programs. Maybe you can contribute your own applications!
• An entry level description on how to use MailBox was presented during YAPC::Europe 2002.
  The paper as PostScript (181kB), PostScript gzipped (74kB), or PDF (221kB).
• The complex internals of message objects where discussed during the German Perl Workshop 2002.
  The paper as Postscript (656kB), Postscript gzipped (174kB), or PDF (238kB).

Development of this module was donated as grant 2003 and grant 2025 by the incredable NLnet Foundation.

The following people made substantial contributions to the suite:

• Mark Overmeer: design and implementation of close to all code.
• Liz Mattijsen: POP3 implementation.
• David Coppit, Tassilo von Parseval, Alan Kelm.