From: Martin Pirker <crf@...>
Date: 2003-04-02T07:48:37+09:00
Subject: parsing/decoding mail/news headers

Hi...

Just trying to put my Ruby skills to useful work - automatic handling,
sorting, indexing of mail/news archives.


Question 1:

In RMail in found header/address parsing functions (nice stuff!), but I
still havn't figured out how to decode the header parts which have been
encoded for 7-bit(?) compatibility,

e.g. given
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Erg=E4nzung?=

should decode to
Subject: Erg�nzung

(that's a german word)
I guess this has something to do with quoted-printable or MIME - are
there some lib functions which do this or how do you do it?



Question 2:
I stumbled upon:

irb(main):001:0> require "time"
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Time.parse ("01 Apr 2003 23:38:05 +0200")
=> Tue Apr 01 23:38:05 CEST 2003
irb(main):003:0> Time.parse ("01 Apr 2033 23:38:05 +0200")
=> Fri Apr 01 23:38:05 CEST 2033
irb(main):004:0> Time.parse ("01 Apr 2043 23:38:05 +0200")
ArgumentError: gmtime error
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/time.rb:162:in 'utc'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/time.rb:162:in 'parse'
        from (irb):4

Large dates are not supported - I guess this has to do with the unix
32bit seconds time thing - unfortunately some spam has pretty crap
in header...
Catching the exception and ignoring that piece of mail/news is current
option, any better?


ruby -version
ruby 1.8.0 (2003-03-03) [i686-linux]


thanks for some hints,
Martin