From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-07-01T15:34:00+09:00
Subject: Mail-related libraries...

I have a pair of scripts that I need to write soon, and I would 
prefer to do them in Ruby. Being new to the Ruby community, though, 
I'm not quite sure which libraries will help me accomplish my task.

Both scripts will be responsible for downloading messages from a POP3 
account. This is the first necessary library, and one that I'm not 
quite seeing. I suspect that there's a library in SGMail or something 
I could pull out of there, but I was wondering if there was another 
library. One of the scripts will be required to delete the messages 
that it has downloaded upon completion. Both scripts will also be 
examining the downloaded messages; I suspect that RubyFilter/RubyMail 
will be best for this part of the task.

One script (call it "remailer") will download messages and first 
verify that they are from a small set of authorized email addresses. 
All other messages will be ignored. It will look in the message for 
an 'X-Actually-To' address. This can be a header or it can be the 
first line of the message. The script will strip that information 
from the message and then send the message otherwise unmodified to 
the address in the 'X-Actually-To' field. This script is necessary 
because I'm on a DSL connection which has a stupid mail 
authentication policy (if you're one of our IP addresses, you're 
okay) and doing dial-in for the user will be unnecessarily expensive 
on vacation. Again, I think that RubyFilter can actually handle 
resending the message -- if RubyMail can handle safely modifying the 
message. At the same time, a quick confirmation message will be sent 
to the authorized user. This script will be deleting the messages 
that it has processed from the POP server.

The second script (call it "forwarder") will forward certain classes 
of mail (specified by text filtering, really, but also to eliminate 
spam) to my TreoMail account. This one may NOT delete messages that 
it forwards.

I have no doubt that these can be done in Ruby; what I don't know is 
how easily/quickly, and what libraries exist to support this sort of 
need.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.07.01 at 02.19.45