Problem while e-mail reading in php

[namita]

I am want to read email using php.
I am using following code,

$body = imap_fetchbody($imap, $id, "1");
echo"$body";


But it gives me unreadable message contents like,

--001636af01dbc45b8d048bc1671d Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 [image: image001.jpg] --001636af01dbc45b8d048bc1671d Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 --001636af01dbc45b8d048bc1671d--

How to read e-mail? What is e-mail parsing?

Please help me, it's urgent for my project.
Thanx.
namita.shah36@googlemail.com