From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-02-07T04:03:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Email parsing

Quoteing rove.monteux@fluid-rock.com, on Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 02:58:24AM +0900:
> I see that the 'Guide' session is incomplete, specially on the subjects 
> of decoding, encoding and using rubymail with net/pop and net/smtp 
> (whats basically you would use rubymail for), any 

Well, that's one way. The other way is to read a local mailbox in unix
mbox format (also the format used by Apple's Mail.app), and to injecting
mail into the delivery system by piping to /usr/bin/mail.

Anyhow, it took me a minute to figure out how I did this, too.

Here's some code ripped from a script I wrote to convert mbox files to
vcards, with some comments added:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

require 'rmail'

addrs = RMail::Address::List.new

ARGV.each { |mbox|
  File.open(File.expand_path(mbox)) { |file|
    puts "Reading: #{file.path}..."

    RMail::Mailbox::MBoxReader.new(file).each_message { |input|

    # input is a single string that is one message. I get it here from
    # the MBoxReader, you'll get it as the return value of pop.pop (used
    # in the mode where it returns the whole message as a string).

    # Then you have to parse it to create a message, do it like this:
      message = RMail::Parser.read(input)

    # Now you can play with the mesage:
      header = message.header
      addrs.concat(header.from)
      addrs.concat(header.recipients)
      addrs.concat(header.reply_to)
    }
  }
}

addrs = addrs.uniq

puts "Unique addrs: #{addrs.size}"


Cheers,
Sam