Rails and IMAP

Hi everyone,

I am wondering how well does RoR play with IMAP?

I am asking because I have a small project to do where I to create an
application where you can semi-automatically respond to email (click on
a button to send a pre-made answer to that email).

So my question is, how nicely does RoR play with IMAP? Is it a hassle
and I need a bunch of plug-ins? Or do they play fairly nice? I
remember having alot of pain in PHP trying to display the emails
properly quite a few years back (decoding the body with the mime parts
and such).

Lastly, any word on performance of RoR with IMAP? Is it an issue?

Thank you very much,

JD

I suspect you found your work with PHP difficult because you were
trying to directly implement the IMAP and/or MIME specs in PHP.
That’s a lot of work, given the quality of the open source libraries
out there.

Thankfully, Ruby has support for IMAP built into it’s standard
library, as well as several options for MIME libraries. These are
trivial to include in your rails code. There’s no reason that you
should have bad performance (and you could always spread out the
Net:IMAP processes across machines if your traffic were large
enough), but I don’t have any direct experience. In any event,
there’s no reason Rails should be the bottleneck.

        - dan


Dan K. mailto:[email protected]
http://www.dankohn.com/ tel:+1-415-233-1000