Comments on: Receiving Email with Rails

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:33:23 +0000

<3 u more

By: ben

ben — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:41:08 +0000

<3 u jason

By: Walter Schreppers

Walter Schreppers — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:40:38 +0000

Thanks for this great tutorial! I will be using this in a project soon.
One question though, when you edit main.cf instead of using aliases I don’t see you specify killerrobot anywhere?

So this means all emails go to the mail_receiver.rb? So that is all emails from all domains running on this postfix ?

If this is so, it might also be an ideal place to do some ruby based spam filtering ;)

Anyway thanks for the great write up. Hope you can find the time to clearify where killerapp@yourdomain.com is used. Or maybe ‘anything’@yourdomain.com. Or how it can be modified to do this since I have about 10 domains running on 1 server, don’t want all of their mails being processed by this system, just one or two of the used domains from my postfix/bind.

Kind regards,
W.

By: Oma Gildner

Oma Gildner — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:51:01 +0000

Awesome blogging site! Now this technologies won’t cease to surprise me personally. So anyways, please maintain the truly great work. If you have the time, I want to listen to your new thoughts on other related things to that. I have to say, my interest is piqued. Now whereis the subscribe option!

By: Devon Sonterre

Devon Sonterre — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:34:17 +0000

A wide variety of things cause to do this.

By: phegaro

phegaro — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:04:32 +0000

After looking at this we went with a model where we had a daemon that would just sit there and poll frequently to an IMAP server. We are using a google apps account to do this and it makes this much easier. You dont have to run your own mail server, you can just poll as frequent or non frequent as you want and if you really want instant you can turn on IMAP IDLE support and then you can get the mail as they come in. Since there is only one daemon running we no longer have this problem.

By: Me

Me — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:55:33 +0000

Is this true?

By: Jose

Jose — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:42:14 +0000

I have several webapps needing this service hosted on the same server (each app receiving mail sent to a different domain).

I'm thinking of creating a separate Rails project just to do the mail receiving. The domain info would be stored in the model so the webapps can separate their mail from each other.

Does this sound reasonable?

By: ɯɐɥɐɹƃ ǝıʌǝʇs

ɯɐɥɐɹƃ ǝıʌǝʇs — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:43:45 +0000

Great article. Only I would use an unless statement, rather than if and a boolean negation operator. more ruby like and more readable IMHO.

i.e.,

unless mail.to.nil?
BEANSTALK = Beanstalk::Pool.new(['127.0.0.1:11300'])
…
end

By: phegaro

phegaro — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:37:24 +0000

I thought the mail_receiver.rb file will be lauched for each email received and then will stick the email in the queue. I realize that it does not do much but it is creating a ruby process and letting it exit for each email. Is that a high overhead on a system?

By: jasonseifer

jasonseifer — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:43:57 +0000

Doing it this way specifically avoids spinning up a new process each time as you're running it as a daemon. You wind up having one process running constantly that processes each one as they come in.

By: phegaro

phegaro — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:40:10 +0000

Some of the other information that i have read talks about how doing it this way means that a new ruby process is started and killed for each email that comes into the system. According to the math above that would mean that you have about 833 processes being created/deleted per minute on the server. Are you guys having issues with that model?

It seems the polling model avoids this but not sure if the tradeoff for less processes is worth the loss in responsiveness and can we just poll more often to get rid of the issue? Like once ever minute?

By: morgancurrie

morgancurrie — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:36:06 +0000

how do you guys deal with stripping the quoted of the reply?

By: technoweenie

technoweenie — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:33:55 +0000

Piping emails to a ruby process can present some scaling issues. Each email is basically another ruby process that loads rubygems, tmail, mms2r, etc. It's probably better to just have postfix dump emails to a maildir and have tmail read them in a little ruby daemon: http://tmail.rubyforge.org/rdoc/classes/TMail/M... . I handled all of our email processing fine with ruby pipes for awhile. But when I moved to our current host, they were quick to suggest using a maildir.

I didn't know about mms2r, but I'll take a look at that. I think I parse the mail parts manually with tmail right now, blah :)

By: giles bowkett

giles bowkett — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:14:59 +0000

hey jason – also check out Astrotrain on github. it receives e-mail and issues xmpp or http in response. blatant plug for my employer but it's what enables Tender to turn e-mails into support discussions. like how Tripit turns e-mails into itineraries automagically.