# Getting by without a server

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [December 9, 2008, 11:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204 "2008-12-09T11:30:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/scudco)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2008, 11:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204/1 "2008-12-09T11:30:41Z")

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ive made a simple budgeting script that takes receipts (with the  
generous help of this community) and one thing i want to add to it is  
the ability to be able to record receipts as they are made i.e. straight  
after paying for a starbucks say. I thought about using my mobile phone  
to email my app the details. I dont have a webserver or anything online  
24\7 so i thought about just emailing a gmail account ill set up for  
this purpose and then just scrape my mails and parse the data into my  
app.

Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something better  
for gmail than this?

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**Author:** ![scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/scudco)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2008, 12:09pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204/2 "2008-12-09T12:09:51Z")

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Adam A. wrote:

> Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something better  
> for gmail than this?

Access Gmail with net/imap possibly?  
:[http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/imap/rdoc/index.html](http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/imap/rdoc/index.html), or use  
Gmails pop3 support - there’s an example here  
[http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4617](http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4617) .

Or, if it’s ‘always on’, you could run a XMPP/Jabber server on your  
machine and receive/process instant messages.  
[http://home.gna.org/xmpp4r/](http://home.gna.org/xmpp4r/)

Hope that helps,

Chris

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**Author:** ![scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/scudco)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2008, 2:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204/3 "2008-12-09T14:45:22Z")

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On Dec 9, 2008, at 4:24 AM, Adam A. wrote:

> app.
> 
> Are there any other options out there that ive missed? Something  
> better  
> for gmail than this?

As Ara told me recently, email is one of the most reliable and robust  
message queues ever made. Servers will try to deliver a message for  
five days and, as you pointed out, you’re receiving computer doesn’t  
even need to be online the whole time. It’s available everywhere and  
you have human interfaces (any MUA) to the queue for debugging.

There’s no reason to be ashamed of a choice like that.

James Edward G. II

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**Author:** ![scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/scudco)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2008, 3:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204/4 "2008-12-09T15:16:36Z")

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Thank you James and Chris for your responses. Im going ahead with using  
gmail as my makeshift server.

Thank you for the advice and links (they will come in handy!)  
adam

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**Author:** ![scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@scudco](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/scudco)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2008, 4:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-by-without-a-server/155204/5 "2008-12-10T16:03:54Z")

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If you want to go large scale with this application, you could look at a  
proper queuing system like Amazon SQS. But I agree, for sending a few  
transactions per day, E-mail is a perfectly adequate store-and-forward  
service.