# Some way to sort and paginate mails read from a POP3 mail se

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/some-way-to-sort-and-paginate-mails-read-from-a-pop3-mail-se/113735>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 4, 2007, 2:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/some-way-to-sort-and-paginate-mails-read-from-a-pop3-mail-se/113735 "2007-09-04T14:15:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ramya\_Addanki](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/7c8e57/32.png) [@Ramya\_Addanki](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Ramya_Addanki)\
**Post date:** [September 4, 2007, 2:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/some-way-to-sort-and-paginate-mails-read-from-a-pop3-mail-se/113735/1 "2007-09-04T14:15:58Z")

</div>

Problem:

I have written a program to fetch mails from a POP3 mail server. I do  
not parse all the mails at once, but i process a predefined number  
based on page\_size ( i could not find a simpler way of pagination), as  
follows

def parseMail(page,pageSize)  
emails=Array.new  
#todo: open the connection only once, and iterate over the  
mails, problem: connection to mail server closed  
Net::POP3::start(MAIL\_SERVER,nil,USER,PASS) do |pop|  
if !pop.mails.empty?  
mails=pop.mails  
start=(page-1)\*pageSize  
last=start+pageSize  
if (mails.length\<last)  
last=mails.length  
end

```
          mails[start..(last-1)].each do|mail|
          begin
              email=TMail::Mail.parse(mail.pop)
              emails.push(email)
              rescue Exception => e
                  puts "Error receiving email at " + Time.now.to_s

```

- "::: " + e.message  
raise e.message  
end  
end # end of the block  
end  
end

As you can see, i populate an array emails with the mails parsed. But  
i want to sort the mails according to the date at which the mail was  
sent. I want to parse the mails in the descending order of the mail’s  
sent date. But pop.mails is an array of strings and i am not sure how  
easily \<=\> operator can be implemented to order the mails this way.

Summary of the problem: A way to sort the mails read from a POP3  
server, while not parsing all the mails.