Help with IMAP documentation

Ruby
1

Being new to ruby, I’m having a little trouble getting my mind around
the documentation for net/imap, located here:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/imap/rdoc/index.html

I understand that if I do:

messagestruct = imap.uid_fetch(10,[“BODYSTRUCTURE”])[0]

I will get a FetchData object and further processing, like:

message = messagestruct.attr[“BODYSTRUCTURE”].parts[0].subtype

would provide me the type of message (Plain, Html, etc) part 0 is.

But I don’t get what I’m ‘doing’. What words would describe the above
commands?

I know that message will be an array of FetchData objects.

Just looking for some help on how to read the documentation.

The current question I’m trying to answer is:

In order to get the plain text portion of a multipart message, am I
really going to have to call uid_fetch (or fetch), twice? Once to get
the BODYSTRUCTURE, then again to actually get at the text?

Thanks for any direction you may provide.

Mike B.

2

On Feb 14, 2007, at 10:05, barjunk wrote:

message = messagestruct.attr[“BODYSTRUCTURE”].parts[0].subtype

would provide me the type of message (Plain, Html, etc) part 0 is.

But I don’t get what I’m ‘doing’. What words would describe the above
commands?

You’ll have to pass the message through a library like TMail to do
further processing on the body.

3

On Feb 14, 10:32 am, Eric H. [email protected] wrote:

You’ll have to pass the message through a library like TMail to do
further processing on the body.

Thanks for that…the thing is, its not very clear to me, by reading
the docs provided, how those message objects are “organized”.

How does one use the documentation provided, along with some
guesswork, about what the different objects “look” like?

Maybe this is just too broad of a question and as I run into issues, I
should just ask specific questions about how to solve a specific
problem…

This is where I see the adopt-a-newbie might come in handy. I don’t
want to be told how to do it, just what things I should be considering
as I read through the docs. Experience will fill in the gaps…it
would be nice if it included experience of others. :slight_smile:

Mike B.
Mike B.

4

On Feb 14, 2007, at 14:20, barjunk wrote:

messagestruct = imap.uid_fetch(10,[“BODYSTRUCTURE”])[0]

You’ll have to pass the message through a library like TMail to do
further processing on the body.

Thanks for that…the thing is, its not very clear to me, by reading
the docs provided, how those message objects are “organized”.

How does one use the documentation provided, along with some
guesswork, about what the different objects “look” like?

There’s two pieces, RFC 3501:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3501.txt

and Net::IMAP docs, particularly fetch:

$ ri Net::IMAP.fetch
-------------------------------------------------------- Net::IMAP#fetch
fetch(set, attr)

  Sends a FETCH command to retrieve data associated with a message
  in the mailbox. The set parameter is a number or an array of
  numbers or a Range object. The number is a message sequence
  number. attr is a list of attributes to fetch; see the
  documentation for Net::IMAP::FetchData for a list of valid
  attributes. The return value is an array of Net::IMAP::FetchData.
  For example:

    p imap.fetch(6..8, "UID")
    #=> [#<Net::IMAP::FetchData seqno=6, attr={"UID"=>98}>, \
         #<Net::IMAP::FetchData seqno=7, attr={"UID"=>99}>, \
         #<Net::IMAP::FetchData seqno=8, attr={"UID"=>100}>]
    p imap.fetch(6, "BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (SUBJECT)]")
    #=> [#<Net::IMAP::FetchData seqno=6, attr={"BODY

[HEADER.FIELDS (SUBJECT)]"=>“Subject: test\r\n\r\n”}>]
data = imap.uid_fetch(98, [“RFC822.SIZE”, “INTERNALDATE”])[0]
p data.seqno
#=> 6
p data.attr[“RFC822.SIZE”]
#=> 611
p data.attr[“INTERNALDATE”]
#=> “12-Oct-2000 22:40:59 +0900”
p data.attr[“UID”]
#=> 98

Maybe this is just too broad of a question and as I run into issues, I
should just ask specific questions about how to solve a specific
problem…

Well, the ri has been immensely helpful to me in writing IMAPCleanse.

This is where I see the adopt-a-newbie might come in handy. I don’t
want to be told how to do it, just what things I should be considering
as I read through the docs. Experience will fill in the gaps…it
would be nice if it included experience of others. :slight_smile:

What are you building?