Perl in a Nutshell

Chapter 14. Email Connectivity

Electronic mail is arguably the most essential Internet application. In fact, for many people, it’s their introduction to the Internet. Thus the Perl modules that deal with email are among the most useful modules. There are two major groups of modules that provide email capabilities. The first group is Graham Barr’s libnet collection, which contains packages for developing client-side applications over the Internet in Perl. Table 14.1 lists some of the protocols implemented by the libnet modules.

Table 14-1. Protocols Implemented by the libnet Modules

Protocol	Module	Description
POP3	Net::POP3	Post Office Protocol, for reading email
SMTP	Net::SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, for sending email
FTP	Net::FTP	File Transfer Protocol, for transferring files between hosts
NNTP	Net::NNTP	Network News Transfer Protocol, for reading Usenet news

In this chapter, we discuss Net::SMTP and Net::POP3. Chapter 15, talks about Net::NNTP, and Chapter 16, discusses Net::FTP. Other libnet modules, such as Net::SNPP and Net::Time, are not described here, but you can get information about them from CPAN or with the perldoc command if libnet is installed on your system.

The second group of mail-related modules are the Mail modules, many of which were also written by Graham Barr. They can be found on CPAN as the MailTools collection. The Mail modules also include Mail::Folder and its subclasses, written by Kevin Johnson, and Mail::POP3Client, by Sean Dowd. This chapter describes ...