

Ask YC: Favorite email parsing library? - cduan

Any recommendations on a good library for parsing emails in mbox format? I'm pretty agnostic as to language (I don't know Python, but if the library is that good, I will learn it). I mostly care that it takes care of all the language encoding business for me. I've been using the Perl Mail::Box suite, and language encodings with that is just a mess.<p>Thanks everyone!
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skwaddor
leave the parsing to someone else and use plan9's upas mail file system

<http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/upas_mail_system/>

<http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/nupas.pdf>

now available for plan9port on Unix

we don't need no stinking APIs and Libs, give us grep awk sed and cat

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zeantsoi
Best parser I've found for PHP is the Pear mimeDecode library. Takes a bit of
time to figure out the header parsing but it's pretty decent at handling the
UW torture test.

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grandalf
rmail for ruby totally rocks for parsing emails. I haven't used it for the
mbox format but I think it can handle it.

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diN0bot
hmm, i've parsed email before. is there something specific to email encoding
than general files? such as parsing the "encoding" header thingy? anything
else?

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uriel
upasfs(4) <http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/4/upasfs>

Edit: Damn, skwiddor beat me to it :)

