You're going to write a program to break down and store the contents of a bunch of email messages.
Please note that while this is a relatively simple matter of programming, we are particularly interested in seeing the design of your solution. We will evaluate your code not only based on correctness but also based on design and organization. Pretend this is code being written to go into production. If you find parts of the spec unclear, implement what you think makes sense and make a note of it. Nothing in here is intended as a "trick question."
Your program will take the messages and write their contents to the filesystem, with the following constraints:
- input will be given as a Maildir
- every message gets its own directory, with a unique name that can be computed from the message itself
- text and html parts, except for attachments, get written as UTF-8 to
body.txtandbody.htm(if there's more than one of either, only save one this way) - all other attachments are written to files with unique names computable from the message
- a file called
manifestis written in some easy-to-load format that maps from the structure of the source message to the files written out - all created files are mode read/write only for the current user
Also include a program that, pointed at one of these generated directories, can print the message's from/to/subject/date, the structure of the original message, and the path to the filename in which each part can be found.
Implement the project in one or more Perl 5 modules. Target whatever version of perl you like, using whatever libraries you like, as long as we can install them from the CPAN. Include at least a simple set of tests using the standard test libraries. Also include an executable program that takes the paths to its input Maildir as arguments and responds to --help and any other relevant options.
If you choose to implement only a subset of this specification, let us know how long you spent on it, and how you decided what to leave out.