NAME

Mail::ListDetector - Perl extension for detecting mailing list messages

SYNOPSIS

  use Mail::ListDetector;

DESCRIPTION

This module analyzes mail objects in any of the classes handled by Email::Abstract. It returns a Mail::ListDetector::List object representing the mailing list.

The RFC2369 mailing list detector is also capable of matching some Mailman and Ezmlm messages. It is deliberately checked last to allow the more specific Mailman and Ezmlm parsing to happen first, and more accurately identify the type of mailing list involved.

METHODS

new

This method is the core of the module. Pass it a mail object, it will either return a Mail::ListDetector::List object that describes the mailing list that the message was posted to, or undef if it appears not to have been a mailing list post.

register_plugin($plugin_name)

Registers a new plugin module that might recognise lists. Should be a subclass of Mail::ListDetector::Detector::Base, and provide the same interface as the other detector modules.

You can eval arbitrary perl code with this, so don't do that if that's not what you want.

EMAILS USED

This module includes a number of sample emails from various mailing lists. In all cases, mails are used with permission of the author, and must not be distributed separately from this archive. If you believe I may have accidentally used your email or content without permission, contact me, and if this turns out to be the case I will immediately remove it from the latest version of the archive.

BUGS

A lot of the code applies fairly simple regular expressions to email address to extract information. This may fall over for really weird email addresses, but I'm hoping no-one will use those for names of mailing lists.
The majordomo and smartlist recognisers don't have much to go on, and therefore are probably not as reliable as the other detectors. This is liable to be hard to fix.
Forwarding messages (for example using procmail) can sometimes break the Sender: header information needed to recognise some list types.

AUTHORS

Michael Stevens - michael@etla.org.
Andy Turner - turner@mikomi.org.
Adam Lazur - adam@lazur.org.
Peter Oliver - p.d.oliver@mavit.freeserve.co.uk
Matthew Walker - matthew@walker.wattle.id.au
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa - miyagawa@bulknews.net
johnnnnnn - john@phaedrusdeinus.org
Mik Firestone - mik@racerx.homedns.org
Simon Cozens - simon@simon-cozens.org