Mimesis is a C++ library for RFC2822 message parsing and creation. It was born out of a frustration with existing email libraries for C++. The goals of Mimesis are:

• Equally good at parsing and building RFC2822 messages.
• Easy API without unnecessary abstraction layers.
• Make good use of C++11 features.

In particular, applications that parse/build emails want to treat them just like a user would treat emails in a mail user agent (MUA). Users don't see emails as a tree of MIME structures; instead they see them as a collection of headers, bodies and attachments. Users also don't see details such as MIME types and content encodings, MUAs handle those details automatically.

Mimesis uses the Meson build system. Ensure you have this installed. Use your operating system's package manager if available, for example on Debian and its derivatives, use sudo apt install meson. If that is not possible, download and install Meson from https://mesonbuild.com/.

To build Mimesis, run these commands in the root directory of the source code:

meson build
ninja -C build

To run the test suite, run:

ninja -C build test

To install the binaries on your system, run:

ninja -C build install

The latter command might ask for a root password if it detects the installation directory is not writable by the current user.

By default, a debug version will be built, and the resulting libraries and header files will be install inside /usr/local/. If you want to create a release build and install it in /usr/, use the following commands:

meson --buildtype=release --prefix=/usr build-release
ninja -C build-release install

Distribution packagers that want to override all compiler flags should use --buildtype=plain. The DESTDIR environment variable is supported by Meson.