Playing around with mails in Rails

I`m trying to create the following feature: You register and receive an email like vouldjeff+ewr@myapp.com and when you send something to this email it automatically appears in something like your wall... So my problem is how to realize the c开发者_如何学编程reation of the email and the receiving of the mail itself. Any ideas?

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Ruby provides Net/IMAP and Net/POP3 you can use to login into your email account. Here's a small tutorial.

POP3

pop = Net::POP3.new("pop.gmail.com", port)
pop.enable_ssl
pop.start('YourAccount', 'YourPassword') 
if pop.mails.empty?
  puts 'No mail.'
else
  i = 0
  pop.each_mail do |m| 
    File.open("inbox/#{i}", 'w') do |f|
      f.write m.pop
    end
    m.delete
    i += 1
  end
  puts "#{pop.mails.size} mails popped."
end
pop.finish 

IMAP

imap = Net::IMAP.new('imap.gmail.com')
imap.authenticate('LOGIN', 'username', 'password')
imap.select('INBOX')
imap.search(['ALL']).each do |message_id|
  msg = imap.fetch(message_id,'RFC822')[0].attr['RFC822']
  MailReader.receive(msg)
  imap.store(message_id, "+FLAGS", [:Deleted])
end
imap.expunge()

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There might be other options but that's how we do it:

• Postfix
• Rails Cron Job

Postfix allows you to specify a MySQL table/view to check whether an email address exists or not. You can also define Mail Forwardings.

• Create a DB View to match the requirements on Postfix
  • This View should contain all the email addresses and forward them to a different mail account, like mailparser.
• Now your Rails can either
  • use a POP3/IMAP frontend to the mailserver (you should install Dovecot or Courier then) to fetch the mails and process them
  • or go to the place on the disk where all the mails are located (check Postfix config for that) and parse the files as TMail objects and process them.

A different option is to make Postfix call script/runner with the Mail data, but rails boot-up can take long and a lot of memory, so I prefer having a Cronjob/Backgroundjob/Worker to do this.

P.S. The Creation of the E-Mail will be done by creating a Model for your Rails app which the View will use as a basis.

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Sending E-Mails is simple as pie. Simply have a look at the ActionMailer Basics. If you also want to receive E-Mail, you should write a daemon that fetches Mails from the mailserver continuously in the background.

Here a snippet that fetches Mails via POP:

require 'net/pop'

config = {
  :host => "mail.example.com",
  :user => "foobar@example.com",
  :password => "…",
  :port => 110,
  :timeout => 10
}

pop = Net::POP3.new(config[:host])    
pop.start(config[:user], config[:password])    

if pop.mails.empty?
  puts "No mails…"
else
  pop.mails.each do |mail|
    # do stuff with mail
  end
end

This is pure Ruby-Code, Rails is not needed for this snippet.