Mail::Address(3) Parse mail addresses

SYNOPSIS


use Mail::Address;
my @addrs = Mail::Address->parse($line);
foreach $addr (@addrs) {
print $addr->format,"\n";
}

DESCRIPTION

"Mail::Address" extracts and manipulates email addresses from a message header. It cannot be used to extract addresses from some random text. You can use this module to create RFC822 compliant fields.

Although "Mail::Address" is a very popular subject for books, and is used in many applications, it does a very poor job on the more complex message fields. It does only handle simple address formats (which covers about 95% of what can be found). Problems are with

  • no support for address groups, even not with the semi-colon as separator between addresses;
  • limited support for escapes in phrases and comments. There are cases where it can get wrong; and
  • you have to take care of most escaping when you create an address yourself: "Mail::Address" does not do that for you.

Often requests are made to the maintainers of this code improve this situation, but this is not a good idea, where it will break zillions of existing applications. If you wish for a fully RFC2822 compliant implementation you may take a look at Mail::Message::Field::Full, part of MailBox.

METHODS

Constructors

Mail::Address->new(PHRASE, ADDRESS, [ COMMENT ])
Create a new "Mail::Address" object which represents an address with the elements given. In a message these 3 elements would be seen like: 

 PHRASE <ADDRESS> (COMMENT)
 ADDRESS (COMMENT)

example: 

 Mail::Address->new("Perl5 Porters", "[email protected]");
$obj->parse(LINE)
Parse the given line a return a list of extracted "Mail::Address" objects. The line would normally be one taken from a To,Cc or Bcc line in a message

example: 

 my @addr = Mail::Address->parse($line);

Accessors

$obj->address()
Return the address part of the object.
$obj->comment()
Return the comment part of the object
$obj->format([ADDRESSes])
Return a string representing the address in a suitable form to be placed on a "To", "Cc", or "Bcc" line of a message. This method is called on the first ADDRESS to be used; other specified ADDRESSes will be appended, separated with commas.
$obj->phrase()
Return the phrase part of the object.

Smart accessors

$obj->host()
Return the address excluding the user id and '@'
$obj->name()
Using the information contained within the object attempt to identify what the person or groups name is.

Note: This function tries to be smart with the ``phrase'' of the email address, which is probably a very bad idea. Consider to use phrase() itself.

$obj->user()
Return the address excluding the '@' and the mail domain

AUTHORS

The MailTools bundle was developed by Graham Barr. Later, Mark Overmeer took over maintenance without commitment to further development.

Mail::Cap by Gisle Aas <[email protected]>. Mail::Field::AddrList by Peter Orbaek <[email protected]>. Mail::Mailer and Mail::Send by Tim Bunce <[email protected]>. For other contributors see ChangeLog.

LICENSE

Copyrights 1995-2000 Graham Barr <[email protected]> and 2001-2007 Mark Overmeer <[email protected]>.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html

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