How to read HTML email text?

I've done a couple of hours web-searching without turning up many
answers so far, and I guess I could figure it out (eventually) from
the MIME format, but here goes with my question...

I don't have any problems reading text emails, but can anybody direct
me to some PHP source code that will read (the text inside) an HTML
email, specifically the "From", "Subject" and especially the message
body?

I would like the code to be able to differentiate between (i.e. know
that it is) a text or an HTML email, and I would like the code to
ignore any attachments.

I don't expect the incoming email to have any (or large) attachments,
but I hope that any code samples can handle the possible case of big
attachments coming along for the ride.

Incidentally, if I did (not this time) want to handle large
attachments, can PHP and/or servers handle megabytes of data being
read into a string variable through fread()? I'm just getting into
this stuff, and not sure of what areas would be a resource and/or
performance hog.

Thanks in advance,

Simon.

SimonC wrote:

> I've done a couple of hours web-searching without turning up many
> answers so far, and I guess I could figure it out (eventually) from
> the MIME format, but here goes with my question...
>
> I don't have any problems reading text emails, but can anybody direct
> me to some PHP source code that will read (the text inside) an HTML
> email, specifically the "From", "Subject" and especially the message
> body?
>

http://pear.php.net

Kind Regards,

Ian P. Christian