Newbie question about pop3 access

I am rather new to Ruby and I want to write a program to play around
with email. I can connect to my chosen pop3 server and iterate through
the mail relatively easily. But my question is how to I parse out the
mail? How do I access the From, Subject, and body? Are there any easy
way's to do this in Ruby without adding lots of new programming
libraries (I found a couple that would make this really easy, but I
don't want to drain my bank account by spending money on them), but I
can't figure out how to do this in straight Ruby...

Do I have to parse out the entire message, or are there easy commands
in the normal net/pop3 library?

I don't quite see how you expect to have anything drain your back
account. Have you seen the following?

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=mail

-- Thomas Adam

···

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 10:05:06AM +0900, furby wrote:

I am rather new to Ruby and I want to write a program to play around
with email. I can connect to my chosen pop3 server and iterate through
the mail relatively easily. But my question is how to I parse out the
mail? How do I access the From, Subject, and body? Are there any easy
way's to do this in Ruby without adding lots of new programming
libraries (I found a couple that would make this really easy, but I
don't want to drain my bank account by spending money on them), but I
can't figure out how to do this in straight Ruby...

Do I have to parse out the entire message, or are there easy commands
in the normal net/pop3 library?

--
"Wanting to feel; to know what is real. Living is a lie." -- Purpoise
Song, by The Monkees.

This is mostly pure speculation based on prior knowledge that hasn't been tested. But, try this:

    require 'net/pop'

     Net::POP3.start('pop.example.com', 110,
                     'YourAccount', 'YourPassword') do |pop|
       if pop.mails.empty?
         puts 'No mail.'
       else
         i = 0
         pop.each_mail do |m| # or "pop.mails.each ..." /^From: (.*?)$/.match(m.pop) # <---
    puts $1
         end
         puts "#{pop.mails.size} mails popped."
       end
     end

Everything that isn't by the # <--- is taken from the net/pop docs.

dan

furby wrote:

···

I am rather new to Ruby and I want to write a program to play around
with email. I can connect to my chosen pop3 server and iterate through
the mail relatively easily. But my question is how to I parse out the
mail? How do I access the From, Subject, and body? Are there any easy
way's to do this in Ruby without adding lots of new programming
libraries (I found a couple that would make this really easy, but I
don't want to drain my bank account by spending money on them), but I
can't figure out how to do this in straight Ruby...

Do I have to parse out the entire message, or are there easy commands
in the normal net/pop3 library?

Actually, I hadn't seen that. All the libraries I found so far cost
money (From $99 up to $450)... I'll check it out.

Thomas Adam wrote:

···

I don't quite see how you expect to have anything drain your back
account. Have you seen the following?

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=mail

-- Thomas Adam

--
"Wanting to feel; to know what is real. Living is a lie." -- Purpoise
Song, by The Monkees.