Mail::...Object(3pm)

💖 Mail::Milter::Object — the glow-up your milter deserves 💖

okay bestie, so this is Mail::Milter::Object, a lil Perl extension living in the User Contributed Perl Documentation collection, and it's here to turn your sad little callback hashes into actual, honest-to-god objects. slay.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

here's the vibe, copy it exactly, don't be weird about it:

package Foo;
use base Mail::Milter::Object;

sub connect_callback {
    my $this = shift;
    my $ctx = shift;
    my @connect_args = @_;
    ...
}

...
my $milter = new Foo;

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so, real talk: normally the milters you hand over to Sendmail::Milter are just… nondescript hash references. like, no name, no personality, just a bag of keys. 💀

Mail::Milter::Object fixes that — it transforms those callback hashes into fully qualified objects that are way easier to maintain and actually understand. and when you pair it up with Mail::Milter::Chain, it gets even better: you get a more modular approach to milter implementation, because each milter can be its own small, granular object that exists independently of the other milters. main character energy, honestly. 👑

every object that inherits from this class gets access to the hash reference that makes up the object itself. but bestie, two caveats, and I need you to actually read them:

• key names you use for private data should be prefixed by an underscore (_), so nothing accidentally gets recognized as a callback name. 🙈
• since a milter object can be reused many times throughout its existence — and maybe even reentrantly if threads are in use — the hashref should only hold global configuration data for this object, not per-message data. anything you're storing per message or per connection? stash it in the milter context object by calling getpriv() and setpriv() on the context object. periodt. 💅

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🎀 METHODS 🎀

new()

creates a new Mail::Milter::Object. ✨ what it does is scan the fully qualified class for milter callback methods with names of the form CALLBACK_callback. and if such a method exists? boom, a corresponding callback entry point gets added to this object. it's giving self-assembling. 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Todd Vierling, <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> — literal icon, we stan. 💜

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• Mail::Milter
• Sendmail::Milter

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! go forth and build granular little milters. this was perl v5.36.0, dated 2023-01-22, and yes the header says Mail::...Object(3pm) because apparently we're being mysterious about it. stay iconic. 🎀✨💖