我的ruby应用程序如何接收和解析带有附件的电子邮件？

Question

I'd like to allow users to send an attachment via email to my app and have the attachment saved in their account. Each user would have a unique and private email to send files to. Something similar to Send to Dropbox is what I'm going for.

I've been searching for a while now and can't find anything on how to approach this. I'm guessing I'm searching the wrong thing. My ultimate question/s is/are: what are the components that go into a feature like this and what are the best gems to get the job done?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use procmail or .forward to pipe the incoming mail into your script. The script comes in along STDIN in mbox format (same as http: headers-blankline-body). I have no clue if there are gems, you can parse it manually with zero difficulty.

.forward is way easier than procmail: on a system with sendmail, if you have an account named my_app , put in ~my_app/.forward the following line:

|/foo/bar/my_app/process_mail.rb

and it will pipe any mails coming to my_app@example.com into /foo/bar/my_app/process_mail.rb . Separate into headers and body, split headers into lines, find the From and Subject header, identify your user, do what you want with the rest.

On Rails, I suspect you should do:

|/usr/bin/env rails runner /foo/bar/my_app/process_mail.rb

or if using Bundler,

|/usr/bin/env bundle exec rails runner /foo/bar/my_app/process_mail.rb

so you get your Rails environment for your script.

Answer 2

Below is a detailed explanation on how to intercept emails with rails:

http://steve.dynedge.co.uk/2010/09/07/incoming-email-in-rails-3-choosing-the-right-approach/