Splitting Emails with MIME::Parser

Question

I got handed 4GB of emails concatenated into a single file and the suggestion that MIME::Parser could split the individual emails back out again. All my attempts to date end up with the parser just copying the original file without extracting any of the emails. So: Is this even something that MIME::Parser can handle? My code is very basic:

my $file = IO::File->new("somefile", O_RDONLY);
my $parser = new MIME::Parser;
$parser->output_dir("somedir");
my $entity = $parser->parse($file);
$file->close;

Below is a link to sample date that some have requested. This is all SPAM and phishing emails. DO NOT CLICK ANY OF THE LINKS. Enjoy: Pastbin of 4KB of emails.

Answer 1

MIME::Parser is for reading a single Mail to get the attachments etc. It can be used to extract mails which are attached inside another mail as message/rfc822 , but is is not intended to extract mails from some kind of archive with lots of mails in it concatenated.

It is not clear what format your single file with mails has. But if it comes from a UNIX system or from a Thunderbird installation it might simply be in the classical Mbox format and there are several tools to split Mbox files into separate messages. Apart from several perl modules there are also other tools like git-mailsplit which help you extract the mails from Mbox-format.