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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T07:53:46+00:00

I’m using Mail::POP3Client for its simplicity and would like to pull the headers of

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I’m using Mail::POP3Client for its simplicity and would like to pull the headers of the latest n messages (5 in my code).
This will be a webscript and on page load the latest 5 emails are downloaded and parsed (their subjects and senders)
But the way it is now I get some assortment of emails from July instead of my latest 5 (I have plenty of emails before July as well). Apparently my $email_count = $pop->Count; is just count and not an index-type value?

for (my $i = $email_count; $i >= $email_count-5; $i--) {
    foreach ($pop->Head($i)) {
        if (/^(From):\s+/i)    { $FROM = $_; }
        if (/^(Subject):\s+/i) { $SUBJECT = $_; }

        if (/^(Date):\s+/i) {
            $TIME = $_;
            $TIME =~ s/Date: (.*)/$1/;

            my $tstamp = str2time($TIME);
#           $TIME = $tstamp;
            $TIME = scalar localtime($tstamp);

            my @fromsubj;
            $fromsubj[0] = $FROM;
            $fromsubj[1] = $SUBJECT;
            $subject{$TIME} = [@fromsubj];
        }
    }


    print "Index: $i \n";
    }
print Dumper(%subject);
print "\n";
print Dumper(%from);

print "Mails $email_count to ".($email_count-5);

Output:

Index: 4030 
Index: 4029 
Index: 4028 
Index: 4027 
Index: 4026 
Index: 4025

$VAR1 = 'Thu Jul 26 09:01:07 2012';
$VAR2 = [
          'From: Person one ',
          'Subject: Fwd: test '
        ];
$VAR3 = 'Tue Jul 24 15:09:43 2012';
$VAR4 = [
          'From: person two ',
          'Subject: subj '
        ];
(And so on)
 ....
Count 4030 4020

How can I pull the latest emails only? Is this possible with POP/this module at all, if not what could I use instead?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This should help a lot – http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt. I’m not seeing anything about sorting by date in there, or anything about sorting at all for that matter.

    I developed an IMAP solution that had to handle a large amount of mail. Since there is no way to limit results, I had to fill an array with tons of ids, and then iterate the array in chunks. When I was developing this solution, POP was unreliable and slow. IMAP definitely isn’t perfect, but developing with it was a lot smoother than pop.

    Since you’re say you’re not dealing with that much data, I would just pull all of the data from the mailbox, then sort it by date and limit it in Perl.

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