Mail::Address(3)

🌸 NAME 🌸

Okay so bestie, welcome to the Mail::Address(3) page from User Contributed Perl Documentation — this is Mail::Address, and its whole thing is parse mail addresses. 💌

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

foreach $addr (@addrs) {
    print $addr->format,"\n";
}

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💖 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.

So here's the tea: Mail::Address is a very popular subject for books, and it's used in many applications, but it does a very poor job on the more complex message fields. It only handles simple address formats (which covers about 95% of what can be found). The 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.

People often ask the maintainers of this code to improve this situation, but the page says that's not a good idea, because 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. 🫶

🌈 Example 🌈

my $s = Mail::Message::Field::Full->new($from_header);
# ref $s isa Mail::Message::Field::Addresses;

my @g = $s->groups;          # all groups, at least one
# ref $g[0] isa Mail::Message::Field::AddrGroup;
my $ga = $g[0]->addresses;   # group addresses

my @a = $s->addresses;       # all addresses
# ref $a[0] isa Mail::Message::Field::Address;

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🛠️ 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", "perl5-porters@africa.nicoh.com");

• $obj->parse($line) — parse the given line and 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 by 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 group's 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.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

This module is part of the MailTools distribution, http://perl.overmeer.net/mailtools/.

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👑 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 <aas@oslonett.no>. Mail::Field::AddrList by Peter Orbaek <poe@cit.dk>. Mail::Mailer and Mail::Send by Tim Bunce <Tim.Bunce@ig.co.uk>. For other contributors see ChangeLog.

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📜 LICENSE 📜

Copyrights 1995-2000 Graham Barr <gbarr@pobox.com> and 2001-2024 Mark Overmeer <perl@overmeer.net>.

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.

💅 That's the whole page, bestie: perl v5.42.0, 2024-12-12, Mail::Address(3). Periodt. 🫶