Rails - Mar 2009 - Extracting just the text of an ActionMailer receive e-mail

Unfortunately my Googling skills have failed me. I''m looking for
something that will help me quickly parse through the body of a
message received by my ActionMailer based code. Here''s the issue: If
someone sends an e-mail to an address that I am reading the body of
the message will often contain two parts: a text version of the
message and/or an HTML version of the message.

I know there are MIME parsing and multi-part issues here, I''m just
looking for a super simple routine that will grab a single text based
version of the message body so that I can store it in my DB. Any
hints, recommendations or links I should be following?

Thanks in advance!

--David
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> Unfortunately my Googling skills have failed me. I''m looking for
> something that will help me quickly parse through the body of a
> message received by my ActionMailer based code. Here''s the issue:
If
> someone sends an e-mail to an address that I am reading the body of
> the message will often contain two parts: a text version of the
> message and/or an HTML version of the message.
>
> I know there are MIME parsing and multi-part issues here, I''m just
> looking for a super simple routine that will grab a single text based
> version of the message body so that I can store it in my DB. Any
> hints, recommendations or links I should be following?
I haven''t done it in Ruby yet, but my advice would be to go find that  
MIME parsing library and use it.

Then it becomes a simple matter of looping through the body parts  
until you find one that is plain text.



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> Unfortunately my Googling skills have failed me. I''m looking for
> something that will help me quickly parse through the body of a
> message received by my ActionMailer based code. Here''s the issue:
If
> someone sends an e-mail to an address that I am reading the body of
> the message will often contain two parts: a text version of the
> message and/or an HTML version of the message.s> 
> I know there are MIME parsing and multi-part issues here, I''m just
> looking for a super simple routine that will grab a single text based
> version of the message body so that I can store it in my DB. Any
> hints, recommendations or links I should be following?
Take a look at MMS2R. While it was written to handle MMS message, it''s
good at pulling apart any kind of email.

-- 
Starr Horne
Check out my Helpdesk RailsKit: http://railskits.com/helpdesk/



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Philip & Starr, thanks for the suggestions. I appreciate the
response.

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I ended up using the MMS2R library and it was quite simple and did
exactly what I needed.

MMS2R is here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/mms2r/

I installed it using the gem command:

   sudo gem install mms2r

Added this to the top of my ActionMailer file:

   require ''mms2r''

Then all I needed to do to get the text only version of the body of an
incoming message was this:

(inside my receive(mail) handler)

mms = MMS2R::Media.new(mail)
plain_body_text = mms.body

The only catch I encountered was that I wanted to extract MMS2R into
my vendor/gems directory but I really had a difficult time finding all
of the dependencies. I ended up punting and simply installing the gem
on my server as well, though I would rather not do that.

I hope this helps anyone searching for this kind of capability.

--David
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