How to: Receive email in rails with mail fetcher

July 23, 2010
Posted by roadburn

How to: Receive email in rails with mail fetcher

Dan Weinand and Luke Francl have written a nice plugin which simplifies the task of retrieving emails. Kudos to them!

So basically what you need to do is install the plugin, create the Action Mailer receiver, and then use cron to schedule the script to run

Here are the steps:

First install the fetcher plugin from http://github.com/look/fetcher/ and SystemTimer gem it requires

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/look/fetcher.git
$ sudo gem install SystemTimer

Create your ruby script eg. script/mail_fetcher

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/environment.rb'
 
require 'system_timer'
require 'yaml'
require 'fetcher'
 
 
begin
  puts "Start checking email"
 
  Lockfile.new('cron_mail_fetcher.lock', :retries => 0) do
    config = YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mail.yml")
    config = config[RAILS_ENV].to_options
 
    fetcher = Fetcher.create({:receiver => EnquiryMailer}.merge(config))
    fetcher.fetch
  end
rescue Lockfile::MaxTriesLockError => e
  puts "Another fetcher is already running. Exiting."
end

Create the config/mail.yml file

defaults: &defaults
  # Settings for gmail
  type: imap                # pop OR imap
  server: imap.gmail.com  # server hostname
  port: 993                 # 993 for IMAPs
  ssl: true                 # Remove if not using SSL
  username: user@gmail.com    # Username
  password: xxx                # Password
  use_login: true           # Required for GMAIL
  processed_folder: processed
  error_folder: error
 
 # settings for bluehost
  type: imap                # pop OR imap
  server: boxXXX.bluehost.com  # server hostname
  port: 993                 # 993 for IMAPs
  ssl: true                 # Remove if not using SSL
  username: user@domain.com    # Username
  password: xxx                # Password
  use_login: true
  processed_folder: INBOX.processed
  error_folder: INBOX.error
 
development:
  <<: *defaults
  # Override other values here
 
test:
  <<: *defaults
  # Override other values here
 
production:
  <<: *defaults
  # Override other values here

Create your Action Mailer

$ script/generate mailer EnquiryMailer

Add the receiver in app/models/enquiry_mailer.rb

class EnquiryMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  def receive(email)
    # do whatever you want with the email here
    # you can use:
    # email.subject, email.from, email.body
  end
end

Run the script

$ script/runner script/mail_fetcher

Then follow Ryan Bate’s screencast on how to use Cron in Ruby

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angela chng – Ruby on Rails / PHP web developer & skater girl in Singapore

How to: Receive email in rails with mail fetcher

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