Hacking Gmail

Reading Mail

I

n Chapter 7, you built scripts and applications to tell you that

you had new mail. In this chapter, you move on to the next log-

ical step and retrieve that mail from Gmail so you can read it.

Reading an individual mail from Gmail is unlike reading individual

mails from a POP3 or IMAP server. In the more common e-mail

systems, an e-mail is identified by a number and can be retrieved

directly. In Gmail, as you found in Chapter 6, this isn’t possible:

You have to retrieve the entire thread and then retrieve the message

from that. In an ideal world, a Gmail library would hide this horri-

ble fact, and they all do this to a lesser or greater extent.

Chapter 9: Reading Mail

The process with Mail::Webmail::Gmail is remarkably easy. You

log in, retrieve the contents of the Inbox, find the thread with the

message you require, retrieve it, find the message within that

thread, and parse out the contents.

The Basics

Logging in and retrieving the contents of the Inbox, as ever,

looks like this:

my $gmail = Mail::Webmail::Gmail->new(

username => “ben.hammersley\@gmail.com”,

password => “XXXXXXXX”,

);

my $messages =

$gmail->get_messages( label =>

$Mail::Webmail::Gmail::FOLDERS{‘INBOX’} );

̨Locating the mail

̨Retrieving the

message source

̨Parsing the

message source

chapter

in this chapter