Can Ruby read emails?

Ruby
1

I know Ruby can do a lot of neat stuff, I was just wondering if someone
has found a way to read emails from a gmail account. The reason is I’m
hoping to create a system that a user can email an account with a
command, and Ruby will read it and exacute that command. Any ideas /
suggestions?

david

2

On 4/23/07, david [email protected] wrote:

I know Ruby can do a lot of neat stuff, I was just wondering if someone
has found a way to read emails from a gmail account. The reason is I’m
hoping to create a system that a user can email an account with a
command, and Ruby will read it and exacute that command. Any ideas /
suggestions?

david

I’ve never tried it but maybe this will work.
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/gmailer/

Harry

3

For what it’s worth, I read a thing where a guy used Python to mount
Gmail as a drive with Linux. That code could probably be translated
into Ruby relatively easily.

4

david [email protected] writes:

I know Ruby can do a lot of neat stuff, I was just wondering if someone
has found a way to read emails from a gmail account. The reason is I’m
hoping to create a system that a user can email an account with a
command, and Ruby will read it and exacute that command. Any ideas /
suggestions?

My reaction to such a scheme is “GAH! NOOOOOOOO!”

That has nothing to do with reading from gmail, and everything to do
with executing commands received via email.

(I managed to hose a university account royally after setting up a
similar system on VMS once)

Please implement some sort of authentication and extensive logging of
commands received and the results of executing them. You’ll thank
yourself later. Also, protect against replay attacks - make sure that
receiving the same exact email twice won’t cause commands to be
executed twice.

5

I believe you could use the ActionMailer suite as a standalone to do
this,
but I second the idea that you’d need to either sanitize the emails or
have
some kind of authentication or both/

6

david [email protected] writes:

I know Ruby can do a lot of neat stuff, I was just wondering if someone
has found a way to read emails from a gmail account. The reason is I’m
hoping to create a system that a user can email an account with a
command, and Ruby will read it and exacute that command. Any ideas /
suggestions?

Well, this can be done and in fact has been done before many times. In
principal, this is not very different in concept from mail lists which
allow
you to send commands to the list server to subscribe, unsubscribe or get
information on a particular list etc. In fact, back before the web and
http,
systems that used e-mail to initiate some action/command were fairly
common.
However, they soon whent out of vogue as various limitations became
problematic
with the growth of the Internet and more malicious activity.
I’d really consider a few things -

  1. E-Mail is an inherently insecure mode of communication.
  2. You have no control over who sends messages to the e-mail address.
  3. Depending on what sort of commands you want executed, you will need
    some
    sort of security/authorisation framework, but due to point 1 above, you
    are
    never going to have a really secure system.

I believe gmail allows retrieval of mail via imap/pop as well as access
via the
web interface. Therefore, you could retrieve the messages using this
method and
then the problem becomes one of parsing the message to get the command.
To make
this process easier, you can either find an existing ruby library for
parsing
mail messages or simply do it yourself (the basic mail message format is
fairly
trivial). To make the parsing easier, you could require commands be
somehow
tagged or otherwise marked to make it easy to extract.

I’m too much of a ruby newbie to point you to existing libraries you
could use,
but I’m sure there are some out there which will do most of the work.
However,
apart from doing this just to see if you can, I can’t see any real
benefit. You
would probably be better off putting effort into something else.

Tim

P.S. I actually wrote a system using Tcl some (too many!) years back
which used
e-mail to “move” a software agent from one host to another. Essentially,
the
agent (a fairly simple Tcl script) wrote its state variables into a file
which
was fairly well defined in structure, then sent that file to an e-mail
address.
The message was retrieved from the mailbox via pop, stripped of its
headers etc
and passed to another Tcl script that worked as a loader. The loader
essentially started a local Tcl agent and set its state to be the values
from
the e-mail message. The new Tcl script then continued execution on that
new
host.

This was really just a proof of concept relating to software agents and
serialisable objects (a very primitive form - this is early 90s before
Java and
other languages had such facilities). I used this very primitive system
to
perform data searches on groups of servers (network connectivity was a
lot less
back then and remote searches could be more expensive). Essentially, you
could
specify the information you wanted (in a very primitive way), the hosts
you
wanted to search and the agent would start. It would “send itself” to
the first
host and start searching for data that matched your criteria. any it
found, it
would put into one of its state variables. When it finished on that
host, it
would send itself to the next host and repeat the process. After doing
this
with all hosts, it would send itself “home”, where it would pop up a
dialog
window (using Tcl/Tk) displaying the results. At the time, I used e-mail
because it was one of the few platform independent communication
facilities
other than writing your own server client system at the Tcl level and
then you
had to deal with different hardware issues depending on the platform
etc. Of
course, as the agents were in Tcl, all platforms had to have a Tcl
interpreter
anyway.

It was fun, but really was not practicle even back then. Of course, now
there
are lots of other approaches that could be used, such as the many OO
languages
which have built in support for serialising objects and pushing them
across a
network. Reflection and other mechanisms which are now much more common
also
provide additional power.

7

On 4/24/07, Tim X [email protected] wrote:

principal, this is not very different in concept from mail lists which allow
you to send commands to the list server to subscribe, unsubscribe or get
information on a particular list etc. In fact, back before the web and http,
systems that used e-mail to initiate some action/command were fairly common.

Yes, you can define some kind of plain-text verbage in the message body,
subject line etc.

The main problem you will encounter is that Net::SMTP has limitations
with respect to accessing GMail (I think its due to TLS, or something
that
is currently unsupported).

As other posters have mentioned, you really do need to consider the
security implications.

Anyway, other suggestions - Ruby’s Mail class is nice for parsing e-mail
files and received e-mails.

You might want to consider not building in Transport level stuff - i.e.
don’t
do POP3, IMAP or SMTP, but use a standard mail client that uses a disk
directory as your inbox (that you can monitor changes to).