Asp Forum - dealing with email attachments (photos

ptkwt

11/22/2004 12:48:00 AM

What I want to do:
I'm setting up a photo blog (probably using Hobix, but that's not final yet).
I want to be able to send an email to a certain email address and have that email
posted to the blog if it meets certain criteria. I also want to be able to
attach photos to the email message. When the script finds that there are
attached photos it should read those attachements, de-encode them and copy them
to a specified photo directory.

It would be great if someone already has a script for doing this sort of thing
that they would be willing to share. If not, perhaps someone could point me in
the right direction - which would be better for this: rubymail or TMail?

Phil

2 Answers

Kevin Bullock

11/22/2004 5:59:00 AM

It just so happens that I was working on a moblog (mobile blogging)
application this spring, and I used rmail to parse out the attachments.
I never got around to doing anything with multimedia attachments; my
script only parses out text sections and combines them. RMail seems to
work well for this, though. You would do something like:

msg = RMail::Parser.read( file_handle )
if msg.multipart?
msg.each_part do | part |
if part.header.media_type == 'image'
# decode image and write to directory
elsif part.header.media_type == 'text'
# add part.body to the text of your posting, however you're storing
it
end
end
end

Pacem in terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock

On Nov 21, 2004, at 7:08 PM, Phil Tomson wrote:

> What I want to do:
> I'm setting up a photo blog (probably using Hobix, but that's not
> final yet).
> I want to be able to send an email to a certain email address and have
> that email
> posted to the blog if it meets certain criteria. I also want to be
> able to
> attach photos to the email message. When the script finds that there
> are
> attached photos it should read those attachements, de-encode them and
> copy them
> to a specified photo directory.
>
> It would be great if someone already has a script for doing this sort
> of thing
> that they would be willing to share. If not, perhaps someone could
> point me in
> the right direction - which would be better for this: rubymail or
> TMail?
>
> Phil
>
>
> !DSPAM:41a13c1566013101614873!

Matt Armstrong

11/22/2004 7:44:00 AM

ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) writes:

> What I want to do:
>
> I'm setting up a photo blog (probably using Hobix, but that's not
> final yet). I want to be able to send an email to a certain email
> address and have that email posted to the blog if it meets certain
> criteria. I also want to be able to attach photos to the email
> message. When the script finds that there are attached photos it
> should read those attachements, de-encode them and copy them to a
> specified photo directory.
>
> It would be great if someone already has a script for doing this
> sort of thing that they would be willing to share. If not, perhaps
> someone could point me in the right direction - which would be
> better for this: rubymail or TMail?

Hi Phil,

Disclaimer: I wrote and maintain RubyMail. :-)

RubyMail and its companion package RubyFilter are geared toward this
kind of problem -- you really have to consider the features they
provide as a unit. I wrote them to replace my use of "procmail" and
they have been handling all of my incoming email for years.

TMail has some definite advantages over RubyMail: support for Japanse
encodings in email addresses, subject lines, etc.; better support for
reading/writing mail from mailboxes; supports more of the MIME
standards, etc. Despite RubyMail being 3+ years old, TMail is even
more mature. As a downside, I don't think it is as well documented
(at least in English) and I find it harder to figure out how to use it
(but clearly *my* opinion on this means nothing). I also wrote
RubyMail with efficiency in mind. It has been a while since I ran any
benchmarks, but it was faster than TMail at parsing messages at the
time.

Last week I made some noise about soon introducing lots of
incompatible changes to RubyMail, but I am going to back away from
that and make the changes much more incremental and more compatible.
Though, I do plan to fold RubyFilter into RubyMail itself.

RubyMail+RubyFilter have been used successfully in a few real world
applications (that I know of):

- One of the more minor top level country code domain registrars uses
it to process their abuse@ mailbox.

- There is http://www.merlin... rbmhshow -- a MIME aware
message viewer for the ancient MH mail system. I think this is
really cool! I'm actually working on folding in some of the
features he had to hack into RubyMail back into the main package.

- A few folks have mailed me about RubyFilter setup issues, etc.

What the package lacks are recipes for things like you describe.
Kevin's skeleton code below is pretty good:

> msg = RMail::Parser.read( file_handle )
> if msg.multipart?
> msg.each_part do | part |
> if part.header.media_type == 'image'
> # decode image and write to directory
> elsif part.header.media_type == 'text'
> # add part.body to the text of your posting,
> however you're storing it
> end
> end
> end

Once you have a part that stores the .jpg or whatever, you can call

part.decode

and you'll get the un-base64 encoded version of the data.

----------------------------------------

If you go with RubyFilter, included in the package is an rdeliver
script that can handle the processing of the incoming message in a
pretty "safe" way (reduced chance for bouncing the message, etc.).

When set up, you'd have an .rdeliver script that looked something like
this obviously over-simplified script:

def main
if message.multipart?
message.each_part do | part |
case part.header.media_type
when 'image'
File.open(some_unique_file_name, 'w') { |f|
f.write(part.decode)
}
end
end
end

Anyway, I'd be happy to walk you through any rough patches with
RubyMail/RubyFilter.

--
matt

comp.lang.ruby

dealing with email attachments (photos

ptkwt

Kevin Bullock

Matt Armstrong

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