NAME
    MIME-tools - modules for parsing (and creating!) MIME entities

SYNOPSIS
    Here's some pretty basic code for parsing a MIME message, and outputting its
    decoded components to a given directory:

        use MIME::Parser;
         
        ### Create parser, and set some parsing options:
        my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
        $parser->output_under("$ENV{HOME}/mimemail");
         
        ### Parse input:
        $entity = $parser->parse(\*STDIN) or die "parse failed\n";
        
        ### Take a look at the top-level entity (and any parts it has):
        $entity->dump_skeleton; 

    Here's some code which composes and sends a MIME message containing three
    parts: a text file, an attached GIF, and some more text:

        use MIME::Entity;

        ### Create the top-level, and set up the mail headers:
        $top = MIME::Entity->build(Type    =>"multipart/mixed",
                                   From    => "me\@myhost.com",
                                   To      => "you\@yourhost.com",
                                   Subject => "Hello, nurse!");
        
        ### Part #1: a simple text document: 
        $top->attach(Path=>"./testin/short.txt");
        
        ### Part #2: a GIF file:
        $top->attach(Path        => "./docs/mime-sm.gif",
                     Type        => "image/gif",
                     Encoding    => "base64");
            
        ### Part #3: some literal text:
        $top->attach(Data=>$message);
        
        ### Send it:
        open MAIL, "| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi -oem" or die "open: $!";
        $top->print(\*MAIL);
        close MAIL;

DESCRIPTION
    MIME-tools is a collection of Perl5 MIME:: modules for parsing, decoding,
    *and generating* single- or multipart (even nested multipart) MIME messages.
    (Yes, kids, that means you can send messages with attached GIF files).

A QUICK TOUR
  Overview of the classes

    Here are the classes you'll generally be dealing with directly:

               .------------.
               | MIME::     |
               | Parser     |
               `------------'
                  | parse()
                  | returns a...
                  |
                  |
                  |
                  |    head()       .--------.
                  |    returns...   | MIME:: | get()
                  V       .-------->| Head   | etc... 
               .--------./          `--------'      
         .---> | MIME:: | 
         `-----| Entity |           .--------. 
       parts() `--------'\          | MIME:: | 
       returns            `-------->| Body   |
       sub-entities    bodyhandle() `--------'
       (if any)        returns...       | open() 
                                        | returns...
                                        | 
                                        V  
                                    .--------. read()    
                                    | IO::   | getline()  
                                    | Handle | print()          
                                    `--------' etc...    

    To illustrate, parsing works this way:

    *   The "parser" parses the MIME stream. A parser is an instance of
        `MIME::Parser'. You hand it an input stream (like a filehandle) to parse
        a message from: if the parse is successful, the result is an "entity".

    *   A parsed message is represented by an "entity". An entity is an instance of
        `MIME::Entity' (a subclass of `Mail::Internet'). If the message had
        "parts" (e.g., attachments), then those parts are "entities" as well,
        contained inside the top-level entity. Each entity has a "head" and a
        "body".

    *   The entity's "head" contains information about the message. A "head" is an
        instance of `MIME::Head' (a subclass of `Mail::Header'). It contains
        information from the message header: content type, sender, subject line,
        etc.

    *   The entity's "body" knows where the message data is. You can ask to "open"
        this data source for *reading* or *writing*, and you will get back an
        "I/O handle".

    *   You can open() a "body" and get an "I/O handle" to read/write message data.
        This handle is an object that is basically like an IO::Handle or a
        FileHandle... it can be any class, so long as it supports a small,
        standard set of methods for reading from or writing to the underlying
        data source.

    A typical multipart message containing two parts -- a textual greeting and
    an "attached" GIF file -- would be a tree of MIME::Entity objects, each of
    which would have its own MIME::Head. Like this:

        .--------.
        | MIME:: | Content-type: multipart/mixed 
        | Entity | Subject: Happy Samhaine!
        `--------'
             |
             `----.
            parts |
                  |   .--------.   
                  |---| MIME:: | Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
                  |   | Entity | Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
                  |   `--------' 
                  |   .--------.   
                  |---| MIME:: | Content-type: image/gif
                      | Entity | Content-transfer-encoding: base64
                      `--------' Content-disposition: inline; 
                                   filename="hs.gif"

  Parsing, in a nutshell

    You usually start by creating an instance of MIME::Parser and setting up
    certain parsing parameters: what directory to save extracted files to, how
    to name the files, etc.

    You then give that instance a readable filehandle on which waits a MIME
    message. If all goes well, you will get back a MIME::Entity object (a
    subclass of Mail::Internet), which consists of...

    *   A MIME::Head (a subclass of Mail::Header) which holds the MIME header data.

    *   A MIME::Body, which is a object that knows where the body data is. You ask
        this object to "open" itself for reading, and it will hand you back an
        "I/O handle" for reading the data: this is a FileHandle-like object, and
        could be of any class, so long as it conforms to a subset of the
        IO::Handle interface.

    If the original message was a multipart document, the MIME::Entity object
    will have a non-empty list of "parts", each of which is in turn a
    MIME::Entity (which might also be a multipart entity, etc, etc...).

    Internally, the parser (in MIME::Parser) asks for instances of MIME::Decoder
    whenever it needs to decode an encoded file. MIME::Decoder has a mapping
    from supported encodings (e.g., 'base64') to classes whose instances can
    decode them. You can add to this mapping to try out new/experiment
    encodings. You can also use MIME::Decoder by itself.

  Composing, in a nutshell

    All message composition is done via the MIME::Entity class. For single-part
    messages, you can use the MIME::Entity/build constructor to create MIME
    entities very easily.

    For multipart messages, you can start by creating a top-level `multipart'
    entity with MIME::Entity::build(), and then use the similar
    MIME::Entity::attach() method to attach parts to that message. *Please
    note:* what most people think of as "a text message with an attached GIF
    file" is *really* a multipart message with 2 parts: the first being the text
    message, and the second being the GIF file.

    When building MIME a entity, you'll have to provide two very important
    pieces of information: the *content type* and the *content transfer
    encoding*. The type is usually easy, as it is directly determined by the
    file format; e.g., an HTML file is `text/html'. The encoding, however, is
    trickier... for example, some HTML files are `7bit'-compliant, but others
    might have very long lines and would need to be sent `quoted-printable' for
    reliability.

    See the section on encoding/decoding for more details, as well as the
    section on "A MIME PRIMER".

  Encoding/decoding, in a nutshell

    The MIME::Decoder class can be used to *encode* as well; this is done when
    printing MIME entities. All the standard encodings are supported (see the
    section on "A MIME PRIMER" for details):

        Encoding...       Normally used when message contents are...
        -------------------------------------------------------------------
        7bit              7-bit data with under 1000 chars/line, or multipart.
        8bit              8-bit data with under 1000 chars/line.
        binary            8-bit data with possibly long lines (or no line breaks).
        quoted-printable  Text files with some 8-bit chars (e.g., Latin-1 text).
        base64            Binary files.

    Which encoding you choose for a given document depends largely on (1) what
    you know about the document's contents (text vs binary), and (2) whether you
    need the resulting message to have a reliable encoding for 7-bit Internet
    email transport.

    In general, only `quoted-printable' and `base64' guarantee reliable
    transport of all data; the other three "no-encoding" encodings simply pass
    the data through, and are only reliable if that data is 7bit ASCII with
    under 1000 characters per line, and has no conflicts with the multipart
    boundaries.

    I've considered making it so that the content-type and encoding can be
    automatically inferred from the file's path, but that seems to be asking for
    trouble... or at least, for Mail::Cap...

  Other stuff you can do

    If you want to tweak the way this toolkit works (for example, to turn on
    debugging), use the routines in the MIME::ToolUtils module.

  Good advice

    *   Run with -w on. If you see a warning about a deprecated method, change your
        code ASAP. This will ease upgrades tremendously.

    *   Don't try to MIME-encode using the non-standard MIME encodings. It's just
        not a good practice if you want people to be able to read your messages.

    *   Be aware of possible thrown exceptions. For example, if your mail-handling
        code absolutely must not die, then perform mail parsing like this:

            $entity = eval { $parser->parse(\*INPUT) };

        Parsing is a complex process, and some components may throw exceptions
        if seriously-bad things happen. Since "seriously-bad" is in the eye of
        the beholder, you're better off *catching* possible exceptions instead
        of asking me to propagate `undef' up the stack. Use of exceptions in
        reusable modules is one of those religious issues we're never all going
        to agree upon; thankfully, that's what `eval{}' is good for.

NOTES
  Design issues

    Why the need for temp files?  Why not do everything in core?
        Although the amount of core available on even a modest home system
        continues to grow, the size of attachments continues to grow with it. I
        wanted to make sure that even users with small systems could deal with
        decoding multi-megabyte sounds and movie files. That means not being
        core-bound.

    Why assume that MIME objects are email objects?
        Achim Bohnet once pointed out that MIME headers do nothing more than
        store a collection of attributes, and thus could be represented as
        objects which don't inherit from Mail::Header.

        I agree in principle, but RFC-1521 says otherwise. RFC-1521 [MIME]
        headers are a syntactic subset of RFC-822 [email] headers. Perhaps a
        better name for these modules would have been RFC1521:: instead of
        MIME::, but we're a little beyond that stage now.

        When I originally wrote these modules for the CPAN, I agonized for a
        long time about whether or not they really should subclass from
        Mail::Internet (then at version 1.17). Thanks to Graham Barr, who
        graciously evolved MailTools 1.06 to be more MIME-friendly, unification
        was achieved at MIME-tools release 2.0. The benefits in reuse alone have
        been substantial.

  Questionable practices

    Fuzzing of CRLF and newline on input
        RFC-1521 dictates that MIME streams have lines terminated by CRLF
        (`"\r\n"'). However, it is extremely likely that folks will want to
        parse MIME streams where each line ends in the local newline character
        `"\n"' instead.

        An attempt has been made to allow the parser to handle both CRLF and
        newline-terminated input.

    Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when decoding
        The `"7bit"' and `"8bit"' decoders will decode both a `"\n"' and a
        `"\r\n"' end-of-line sequence into a `"\n"'.

        The `"binary"' decoder (default if no encoding specified) still outputs
        stuff verbatim... so a MIME message with CRLFs and no explicit encoding
        will be output as a text file that, on many systems, will have an
        annoying ^M at the end of each line... *but this is as it should be*.

    Fuzzing of CRLF and newline when encoding/composing
        All encoders currently output the end-of-line sequence as a `"\n"', with
        the assumption that the local mail agent will perform the conversion
        from newline to CRLF when sending the mail. However, there probably
        should be an option to output CRLF as per RFC-1521.

    Inability to handle multipart boundaries with embedded newlines
        First, let's get something straight: this is an evil, EVIL practice. If
        your mailer creates multipart boundary strings that contain newlines,
        give it two weeks notice and find another one. If your mail robot
        receives MIME mail like this, regard it as syntactically incorrect,
        which it is.

A MIME PRIMER
    So you need to parse (or create) MIME, but you're not quite up on the
    specifics? No problem...

  Glossary

    Here are some definitions adapted from RFC-1521 explaining the terminology
    we use; each is accompanied by the equivalent in MIME:: module terms...

    attachment
        An "attachment" is common slang for any part of a multipart message --
        except, perhaps, for the first part, which normally carries a user
        message describing the attachments that follow (e.g.: "Hey dude, here's
        that GIF file I promised you.").

        In our system, an attachment is just a MIME::Entity under the top-level
        entity, probably one of its parts.

    body
        The "body" of an entity is that portion of the entity which follows the
        header and which contains the real message content. For example, if your
        MIME message has a GIF file attachment, then the body of that attachment
        is the base64-encoded GIF file itself.

        A body is represented by an instance of MIME::Body. You get the body of
        an entity by sending it a bodyhandle() message.

    body part
        One of the parts of the body of a multipart /entity. A body part has a
        /header and a /body, so it makes sense to speak about the body of a body
        part.

        Since a body part is just a kind of entity, it's represented by an
        instance of MIME::Entity.

    entity
        An "entity" means either a /message or a /body part. All entities have a
        /header and a /body.

        An entity is represented by an instance of MIME::Entity. There are
        instance methods for recovering the header (a MIME::Head) and the body
        (a MIME::Body).

    header
        This is the top portion of the MIME message, which contains the
        "Content-type", "Content-transfer-encoding", etc. Every MIME entity has
        a header, represented by an instance of MIME::Head. You get the header
        of an entity by sending it a head() message.

    message
        A "message" generally means the complete (or "top-level") message being
        transferred on a network.

        There currently is no explicit package for "messages"; under MIME::,
        messages are streams of data which may be read in from files or
        filehandles. You can think of the MIME::Entity returned by the
        MIME::Parser as representing the full message.

  Content types

    This indicates what kind of data is in the MIME message, usually as
    *majortype/minortype*. The standard major types are shown below. A more-
    comprehensive listing may be found in RFC-2046.

    application
        Data which does not fit in any of the other categories, particularly
        data to be processed by some type of application program.
        `application/octet-stream', `application/gzip',
        `application/postscript'...

    audio
        Audio data. `audio/basic'...

    image
        Graphics data. `image/gif', `image/jpeg'...

    message
        A message, usually another mail or MIME message. `message/rfc822'...

    multipart
        A message containing other messages. `multipart/mixed',
        `multipart/alternative'...

    text
        Textual data, meant for humans to read. `text/plain', `text/html'...

    video
        Video or video+audio data. `video/mpeg'...

  Content transfer encodings

    This is how the message body is packaged up for safe transit. There are the
    5 major MIME encodings. A more-comprehensive listing may be found in RFC-
    2045.

    7bit
        No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that no 8-bit
        characters are present, and that lines do not exceed 1000 characters in
        length (including the CRLF).

    8bit
        No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that the message
        might contain 8-bit characters, and that lines do not exceed 1000
        characters in length (including the CRLF).

    binary
        No encoding is done at all. This label simply asserts that the message
        might contain 8-bit characters, and that lines may exceed 1000
        characters in length. Such messages are the *least* likely to get
        through mail gateways.

    base64
        A standard encoding, which maps arbitrary binary data to the 7bit
        domain. Like "uuencode", but very well-defined. This is how you should
        send essentially binary information (tar files, GIFs, JPEGs, etc.).

    quoted-printable
        A standard encoding, which maps arbitrary line-oriented data to the 7bit
        domain. Useful for encoding messages which are textual in nature, yet
        which contain non-ASCII characters (e.g., Latin-1, Latin-2, or any other
        8-bit alphabet).

TERMS AND CONDITIONS
    Eryq (eryq@zeegee.com), ZeeGee Software Inc (http://www.zeegee.com).

    Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 by ZeeGee Software Inc (www.zeegee.com).

    All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it
    and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See the COPYING file
    in the distribution for details.

SUPPORT
    Please email me directly with questions/problems (see AUTHOR below).

    If you want to be placed on an email distribution list (not a mailing list!)
    for MIME-tools, and receive bug reports, patches, and updates as to when new
    MIME-tools releases are planned, just email me and say so. If your project
    is using MIME-tools, it might not be a bad idea to find out about those bugs
    *before* they become problems...

CHANGE LOG
    Version 5.205
        Added terminating newline to all parser messages, and fixed small parser
        bug that was dropping parts when errors occurred in certain places.

    Version 5.203
        Brand new parser based on new (private) MIME::Parser::Reader and
        (public) MIME::Parser::Results. Fast and yet simple and very tolerant of
        bad MIME when desired. Message reporting needs some muzzling.

        MIME::Parser now has ignore_errors() set true by default.

    Version 5.116
        Removed Tmpfile.t test, which was causing a bogus failure in "make
        test". Now we require 5.004 for MIME::Parser anyway, so we don't need
        it. *Thanks to Jonathan Cohn for reporting this.*

    Version 5.115
        Fixed Ref.t bug, and documented how to remove parts from a MIME::Entity.

    Version 5.114
        Entity now uses MIME::Lite-style default suggested encoding.

        More regression test have been added, and the "Size" tests in Ref.t are
        skipped for text document (due to CRLF differences between platforms).

    Version 5.113 (Initial 5.x Beta release)
        Major speed and structural improvements to the parser. *Major, MAJOR
        thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn, Jeremy Gilbert, and Doru Petrescu for all
        the patches, benchmarking, and Beta-testing!*

        Convenient new one-directory-per-message parsing mechanism. Now through
        `MIME::Parser' method `output_under()', you can tell the parser that you
        want it to create a unique directory for each message parsed, to hold
        the resulting parts.

        Elimination of $', $` and $&. Wow... I still can't believe I missed
        this. D'OH! *Thanks to Noel Burton-Krahn for all his patches.*

        Parser is more tolerant of weird EOL termination. Some mailagents are
        can terminate lines with "\r\r\n". We're okay with that now when we
        extract the header. *Thanks to Joao Fonseca for pointing this out.*

        Parser is tolerant of "From " lines in headers. *Thanks to Joachim
        Wieland, Anthony Hinsinger, Marius Stan, and numerous others.*

        Parser catches syntax errors in headers. *Thanks to Russell P.
        Sutherland for catching this.*

        Parser no longer warns when subtype is undefined. *Thanks to Eric-
        Olivier Le Bigot for his fix.*

        Better integration with Mail::Internet. For example, smtpsend() should
        work fine. *Thanks to Michael Fischer and others for the patch.*

        Miscellaneous cleanup. *Thanks to Marcus Brinkmann for additional
        helpful input.* *Thanks to Klaus Seidenfaden for good feedback on 5.x
        Alpha!*

    Version 4.123
        Cleaned up some of the tests for non-Unix OS'es. Will require a few
        iterations, no doubt.

    Version 4.122
        Resolved CORE::open warnings for 5.005. *Thanks to several folks for
        this bug report.*

    Version 4.121
        Fixed MIME::Words infinite recursion. *Thanks to several folks for this
        bug report.*

    Version 4.117
        Nicer MIME::Entity::build. No longer outputs warnings with undefined
        Filename, and now accepts Charset as well. *Thanks to Jason Tibbits III
        for the inspirational patch.*

        Documentation fixes. Hopefully we've seen the last of the pod2man
        warnings...

        Better test logging. Now uses ExtUtils::TBone.

    Version 4.116
        Bug fix: MIME::Head and MIME::Entity were not downcasing the content-
        type as they claimed. This has now been fixed. *Thanks to Rodrigo de
        Almeida Siqueira for finding this.*

    Version 4.114
        Gzip64-encoding has been improved, and turned off as a default, since it
        depends on having gzip installed. See MIME::Decoder::Gzip64 if you want
        to activate it in your app. You can now set up the gzip/gunzip commands
        to use, as well. *Thanks to Paul J. Schinder for finding this bug.*

    Version 4.113
        Bug fix: MIME::ParserBase was accidentally folding newlines in header
        fields. *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for spotting this.*

    Version 4.112
        MIME::Entity::print_body now recurses when printing multipart entities,
        and prints "everything following the header." This is more likely what
        people expect to happen. PLEASE read the "two body problem" section of
        MIME::Entity's docs.

    Version 4.111
        Clean build/test on Win95 using 5.004. Whew.

    Version 4.110
        Added make_multipart() and make_singlepart() in MIME::Entity.

        Improved handling/saving of preamble/epilogue.

    Version 4.109
    Overall Major version shift to 4.x accompanies numerous structural changes, and
            the deletion of some long-deprecated code. Many apologies to those
            who are inconvenienced by the upgrade.

            MIME::IO deprecated. You'll see IO::Scalar, IO::ScalarArray, and
            IO::Wrap to make this toolkit work.

            MIME::Entity deep code. You can now deep-copy MIME entities (except
            for on-disk data files).

    Encoding/decoding
            MIME::Latin1 deprecated, and 8-to-7 mapping removed. Really,
            MIME::Latin1 was one of my more dumber ideas. It's still there, but
            if you want to map 8-bit characters to Latin1 ASCII approximations
            when 7bit encoding, you'll have to request it explicitly. *But use
            quoted-printable for your 8-bit documents; that's what it's there
            for!*

            7bit and 8bit "encoders" no longer encode. As per RFC-2045, these
            just do a pass-through of the data, but they'll warn you if you send
            bad data through.

            MIME::Entity suggests encoding. Now you can ask MIME::Entity's
            build() method to "suggest" a legal encoding based on the body and
            the content-type. No more guesswork! See the "mimesend" example.

            New module structure for MIME::Decoder classes. It should be easier
            for you to see what's happening.

            New MIME decoders! Support added for decoding `x-uuencode', and for
            decoding/encoding `x-gzip64'. You'll need "gzip" to make the latter
            work.

            Quoted-printable back on track... and then some. The 'quoted-
            printable' decoder now uses the newest MIME::QuotedPrint, and amends
            its output with guideline #8 from RFC2049 (From/.). *Thanks to Denis
            N. Antonioli for suggesting this.*

    Parsing Preamble and epilogue are now saved. These are saved in the parsed
            entities as simple string-arrays, and are output by print() if
            there. *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.*

            The "multipart/digest" semantics are now preserved. Parts of digest
            messages have their mime_type() defaulted to "message/rfc822"
            instead of "text/plain", as per the RFC. *Thanks to Carsten Heyl for
            suggesting this.*

    Output  Well-defined, more-complete print() output. When printing an entity, the
            output is now well-defined if the entity came from a MIME::Parser,
            even if using parse_nested_messages. See MIME::Entity for details.

            You can prevent recommended filenames from being output. This
            possible security hole has been plugged; when building MIME
            entities, you can specify a body path but suppress the filename in
            the header. *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts for suggesting this.*

    Bug fixes
            Win32 installations should work. The binmode() calls should work
            fine on Win32 now. *Thanks to numerous folks for their patches.*

            MIME::Head::add() now no longer downcases its argument. *Thanks to
            Brandon Browning & Jason L. Tibbitts for finding this bug.*

    Version 3.204
        Bug in MIME::Head::original_text fixed. Well, it took a while, but
        another bug surfaced from my transition from 1.x to 2.x. This method
        was, quite idiotically, sorting the header fields. *Thanks, as usual, to
        Andreas Koenig for spotting this one.*

        MIME::ParserBase no longer defaults to RFC-1522-decoding headers. The
        documentation correctly stated that the default setting was to *not*
        RFC-1522-decode the headers. The code, on the other hand, was init'ing
        this parser option in the "on" position. This has been fixed.

        MIME::ParserBase::parse_nested_messages reexamined. If you use this
        feature, please re-read the documentation. It explains a little more
        precisely what the ramifications are.

        MIME::Entity tries harder to ensure MIME compliance. It is now a fatal
        error to use certain bad combinations of content type and encoding when
        "building", or to attempt to "attach" to anything that is not a
        multipart document. My apologies if this inconveniences anyone, but it
        was just too darn easy before for folks to create bad MIME, and gosh
        darn it, good libraries should at least *try* to protect you from
        mistakes.

        The "make" now halts if you don't have the right stuff, provided your
        MakeMaker supports PREREQ_PM. See the section on "REQUIREMENTS" for what
        you need to install this package. I still provide old courtesy copies of
        the MIME:: decoding modules. *Thanks to Hugo van der Sanden for
        suggesting this.*

        The "make test" is far less chatty. Okay, okay, STDERR is evil. Now a
        `"make test"' will just give you the important stuff: do a `"make test
        TEST_VERBOSE=1"' if you want the gory details (advisable if sending me a
        bug report). *Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.*

    Version 3.203
        No, there haven't been any major changes between 2.x and 3.x. The major-
        version increase was from a few more tweaks to get $VERSION to be
        calculated better and more efficiently (I had been using RCS version
        numbers in a way which created problems for users of CPAN::). After a
        couple of false starts, all modules have been upgraded to RCS 3.201 or
        higher.

        You can now parse a MIME message from a scalar, an array-of-scalars, or
        any MIME::IO-compliant object (including IO:: objects.) Take a look at
        parse_data() in MIME::ParserBase. The parser code has been modified to
        support the MIME::IO interface. *Thanks to fellow Chicagoan Tim Pierce
        (and countless others) for asking.*

        More sensible toolkit configuration. A new config() method in
        MIME::ToolUtils makes a lot of toolkit-wide configuration cleaner. Your
        old calls will still work, but with deprecation warnings.

        You can now sign messages just like in Mail::Internet. See MIME::Entity
        for the interface.

        You can now remove signatures from messages just like in Mail::Internet.
        See MIME::Entity for the interface.

        You can now compute/strip content lengths and other non-standard MIME
        fields. See sync_headers() in MIME::Entity. *Thanks to Tim Pierce for
        bringing the basic problem to my attention.*

        Many warnings are now silent unless $^W is true. That means unless you
        run your Perl with `-w', you won't see deprecation warnings, non-fatal-
        error messages, etc. But of course you run with `-w', so this doesn't
        affect you. `:-)'

        Completed the 7-bit encodings in MIME::Latin1. We hadn't had complete
        coverage in the conversion from 8- to 7-bit; now we do. *Thanks to Rolf
        Nelson for bringing this to my attention.*

        Fixed broken parse_two() in MIME::ParserBase. BTW, if your code worked
        with the "broken" code, it should *still* work. *Thanks again to Tim
        Pierce for bringing this to my attention.*

    Version 2.14
        Just a few bug fixes to improve compatibility with Mail-Tools 1.08, and
        with the upcoming Perl 5.004 release. *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III
        for reporting the problems so quickly.*

    Version 2.13
    New features
            Added RFC-1522-style decoding of encoded header fields. Header
            decoding can now be done automatically during parsing via the new
            `decode()' method in MIME::Head... just tell your parser object that
            you want to `decode_headers()'. *Thanks to Kent Boortz for providing
            the idea, and the baseline RFC-1522-decoding code!*

            Building MIME messages is even easier. Now, when you use
            MIME::Entity's `build()' or `attach()', you can also supply
            individual mail headers to set (e.g., `-Subject', `-From', `-To').

            Added `Disposition' to MIME::Entity's `build()' method. *Thanks to
            Kurt Freytag for suggesting this feature.*

            An `X-Mailer' header is now output by default in all MIME-Entity-
            prepared messages, so any bad MIME we generate can be traced back to
            this toolkit.

            Added `purge()' method to MIME::Entity for deleteing leftover files.
            *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts III for suggesting this feature.*

            Added `seek()' and `tell()' methods to built-in MIME::IO classes.
            Only guaranteed to work when reading! *Thanks to Jason L. Tibbitts
            III for suggesting this feature.*

            When parsing a multipart message with apparently no boundaries, the
            error message you get has been improved. *Thanks to Andreas Koenig
            for suggesting this.*

    Bug fixes
            Patched over a Perl 5.002 (and maybe earlier and later) bug
            involving FileHandle::new_tmpfile. It seems that the underlying
            filehandles were not being closed when the FileHandle objects went
            out of scope! There is now an internal routine that creates true
            FileHandle objects for anonymous temp files. *Thanks to Dragomir R.
            Radev and Zyx for reporting the weird behavior that led to the
            discovery of this bug.*

            MIME::Entity's `build()' method now warns you if you give it an
            illegal boundary string, and substitutes one of its own.

            MIME::Entity's `build()' method now generates safer, fully-RFC-1521-
            compliant boundary strings.

            Bug in MIME::Decoder's `install()' method was fixed. *Thanks to Rolf
            Nelson and Nickolay Saukh for finding this.*

            Changed FileHandle::new_tmpfile to FileHandle->new_tmpfile, so some
            Perl installations will be happier. *Thanks to Larry W. Virden for
            finding this bug.*

            Gave `=over' an arg of 4 in all PODs. *Thanks to Larry W. Virden for
            pointing out the problems of bare =over's*

    Version 2.04
        A bug in MIME::Entity's output method was corrected. MIME::Entity::print
        now outputs everything to the desired filehandle explicitly. *Thanks to
        Jake Morrison for pointing out the incompatibility with Mail::Header.*

    Version 2.03
        Fixed bug in autogenerated filenames resulting from transposed "if"
        statement in MIME::Parser, removing spurious printing of header as well.
        (Annoyingly, this bug is invisible if debugging is turned on!) *Thanks
        to Andreas Koenig for bringing this to my attention.*

        Fixed bug in MIME::Entity::body() where it was using the bodyhandle
        completely incorrectly. *Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to my
        attention.*

        Fixed MIME::Head::VERSION so CPAN:: is happier. *Thanks to Larry Virden
        for bringing this to my attention.*

        Fixed undefined-variable warnings when dumping skeleton (happened when
        there was no Subject: line) *Thanks to Joel Noble for bringing this to
        my attention.*

    Version 2.02
        Stupid, stupid bugs in both BASE64 encoding and decoding were fixed.
        *Thanks to Phil Abercrombie for locating them.*

    Version 2.01
        Modules now inherit from the new Mail:: modules! This means big changes
        in behavior.

        MIME::Parser can now store message data in-core. There were a *lot* of
        requests for this feature.

        MIME::Entity can now compose messages. There were a *lot* of requests
        for this feature.

        Added option to parse `"message/rfc822"' as a pseduo-multipart document.
        *Thanks to Andreas Koenig for suggesting this.*

    Version 1.13
        MIME::Head now no longer requires space after ":", although either a
        space or a tab after the ":" will be swallowed if there. *Thanks to Igor
        Starovoitov for pointing out this shortcoming.*

    Version 1.12
        Fixed bugs in parser where CRLF-terminated lines were blowing out the
        handling of preambles/epilogues. *Thanks to Russell Sutherland for
        reporting this bug.*

        Fixed idiotic is_multipart() bug. *Thanks to Andreas Koenig for noticing
        it.*

        Added untested binmode() calls to parser for DOS, etc. systems. No idea
        if this will work...

        Reorganized the output_path() methods to allow easy use of inheritance,
        as per Achim Bohnet's suggestion.

        Changed MIME::Head to report mime_type more accurately.

        POSIX module no longer loaded by Parser if perl >= 5.002. Hey,
        5.001'ers: let me know if this breaks stuff, okay?

        Added unsupported ./examples directory.

    Version 1.11
        Converted over to using Makefile.PL. *Thanks to Andreas Koenig for the
        much-needed kick in the pants...*

        Added t/*.t files for testing. Eeeeeeeeeeeh...it's a start.

        Fixed bug in default parsing routine for generating output paths; it was
        warning about evil filenames if there simply *were* no recommended
        filenames. D'oh!

        Fixed redefined parts() method in Entity.

        Fixed bugs in Head where field name wasn't being case folded.

    Version 1.10
        A typo was causing the epilogue of an inner multipart message to be
        swallowed to the end of the OUTER multipart message; this has now been
        fixed. *Thanks to Igor Starovoitov for reporting this bug.*

        A bad regexp for parameter names was causing some parameters to be
        parsed incorrectly; this has also been fixed. *Thanks again to Igor
        Starovoitov for reporting this bug.* It is now possible to get full
        control of the filenaming algorithm before output files are generated,
        and the default algorithm is safer. *Thanks to Laurent Amon for pointing
        out the problems, and suggesting some solutions.*

        Fixed illegal "simple" multipart test file. D'OH!

    Version 1.9
        No changes: 1.8 failed CPAN registration

    Version 1.8.
        Fixed incompatibility with 5.001 and FileHandle::new_tmpfile Added
        COPYING file, and improved README.

AUTHOR
    MIME-tools was created by:

        ___  _ _ _   _  ___ _     
       / _ \| '_| | | |/ _ ' /    Eryq, (eryq@zeegee.com)
      |  __/| | | |_| | |_| |     President, ZeeGee Software Inc.
       \___||_|  \__, |\__, |__   http://www.zeegee.com/
                 |___/    |___/   

    Released as MIME-parser (1.0): 28 April 1996. Released as MIME-tools (2.0):
    Halloween 1996. Released as MIME-tools (4.0): Christmas 1997. Released as
    MIME-tools (5.0): Mother's Day 2000.

VERSION
    $Revision: 5.205 $

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    This kit would not have been possible but for the direct contributions of
    the following:

        Gisle Aas             The MIME encoding/decoding modules.
        Laurent Amon          Bug reports and suggestions.
        Graham Barr           The new MailTools.
        Achim Bohnet          Numerous good suggestions, including the I/O model.
        Kent Boortz           Initial code for RFC-1522-decoding of MIME headers.
        Andreas Koenig        Numerous good ideas, tons of beta testing,
                                and help with CPAN-friendly packaging.
        Igor Starovoitov      Bug reports and suggestions.
        Jason L Tibbitts III  Bug reports, suggestions, patches.
     
    Not to mention the Accidental Beta Test Team, whose bug reports (and
    comments) have been invaluable in improving the whole:

        Phil Abercrombie
        Mike Blazer
        Brandon Browning
        Kurt Freytag
        Steve Kilbane
        Jake Morrison
        Rolf Nelson
        Joel Noble    
        Michael W. Normandin 
        Tim Pierce
        Andrew Pimlott
        Dragomir R. Radev
        Nickolay Saukh
        Russell Sutherland
        Larry Virden
        Zyx

    Please forgive me if I've accidentally left you out. Better yet, email me,
    and I'll put you in.

SEE ALSO
    Users of this toolkit may wish to read the documentation of Mail::Header and
    Mail::Internet.

    The MIME format is documented in RFCs 1521-1522, and more recently in RFCs
    2045-2049.

    The MIME header format is an outgrowth of the mail header format documented
    in RFC 822.

