$head->get issues possibly.

It seems the spammers are breaking more and more Internet rules ... :-)  
I've fought and semi-fixed a few blank fields in the message header but 
more are appearing.  So I'd like some input on whether I'm doing this 
correctly.  It is based on suggestions I got off the list several months 
ago but I could have miss-understood what I was told.

Basically I am opening spam folders and parsing out the Subject, Date, 
From, and Size information and placing it in a report to the spam folder 
owner.
   The problems is the get method on some messages is returning null
values and this causes other code later in the scripts to fail.  The short
questions is there a way to have the get methods to return at least an 
empty string?

This is a rough outline of how I'm currently doing it

my $mgr = Mail::Box::Manager->new;

    my $spam = $mgr->open($file);

    foreach my $msg ($spam->messages) {

        my $head = $msg->head;

        my $from = substr($head->get('From'), 0, 24);
        my $subject = $head->get('Subject');
        my ($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone) =

	...

Currently I'm doing the

      $from .= '';
      $subject .= '';
      $year += 
      $hh += 0;

trick to force a value(?).  Does this make sense?  Is there a slot to
cause Mail-Box to return 'something' for the empty fields so they at least
come back defined?

I am searching the docs but haven't got very far into them yet.


TIA,
Rod
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