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.

Problem solved, using the mimeDecode.php module in PEAR

http://pear.php.net