Extracting just the text of an ActionMailer receive e-mail

Rails
1

Unfortunately my Googling skills have failed me. I’m looking for
something that will help me quickly parse through the body of a
message received by my ActionMailer based code. Here’s the issue: If
someone sends an e-mail to an address that I am reading the body of
the message will often contain two parts: a text version of the
message and/or an HTML version of the message.

I know there are MIME parsing and multi-part issues here, I’m just
looking for a super simple routine that will grab a single text based
version of the message body so that I can store it in my DB. Any
hints, recommendations or links I should be following?

Thanks in advance!

–David

2

hints, recommendations or links I should be following?
I haven’t done it in Ruby yet, but my advice would be to go find that
MIME parsing library and use it.

Then it becomes a simple matter of looping through the body parts
until you find one that is plain text.

3

Unfortunately my Googling skills have failed me. I’m looking for
something that will help me quickly parse through the body of a
message received by my ActionMailer based code. Here’s the issue: If
someone sends an e-mail to an address that I am reading the body of
the message will often contain two parts: a text version of the
message and/or an HTML version of the message.s>
I know there are MIME parsing and multi-part issues here, I’m just
looking for a super simple routine that will grab a single text based
version of the message body so that I can store it in my DB. Any
hints, recommendations or links I should be following?

Take a look at MMS2R. While it was written to handle MMS message, it’s
good at pulling apart any kind of email.

–
Starr H.
Check out my Helpdesk RailsKit: http://railskits.com/helpdesk/

4

Philip & Starr, thanks for the suggestions. I appreciate the
response.

5

I ended up using the MMS2R library and it was quite simple and did
exactly what I needed.

MMS2R is here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/mms2r/

I installed it using the gem command:

sudo gem install mms2r

Added this to the top of my ActionMailer file:

require ‘mms2r’

Then all I needed to do to get the text only version of the body of an
incoming message was this:

(inside my receive(mail) handler)

mms = MMS2R::Media.new(mail)
plain_body_text = mms.body

The only catch I encountered was that I wanted to extract MMS2R into
my vendor/gems directory but I really had a difficult time finding all
of the dependencies. I ended up punting and simply installing the gem
on my server as well, though I would rather not do that.

I hope this helps anyone searching for this kind of capability.

–David