# Can Ruby read emails? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [April 23, 2007, 5:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699 "2007-04-23T05:41:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 5:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/1 "2007-04-23T05:41:27Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 5:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/2 "2007-04-23T05:58:23Z")
On 4/23/07, david [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) 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/](http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/gmailer/) Harry ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 7:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/3 "2007-04-23T07:00:32Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 7:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/4 "2007-04-23T07:12:33Z")
david [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) 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. ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2007, 8:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/5 "2007-04-23T08:10:36Z")
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/ ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2007, 12:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/6 "2007-04-24T12:21:08Z")
david [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) 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. ---
**Author:** ![david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@david](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/david)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2007, 12:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-ruby-read-emails/92699/7 "2007-04-24T12:34:11Z")
On 4/24/07, Tim X [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) 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).