Need Help on Reading Emails with "Mail" Gem in Ruby

How to retrieve only unread emails with ruby mail gem?

This question was answered in Need help on reading emails with "mail" gem in ruby

However the answer was not accepted - don´t know why. Also the question did not mention "unread email" nor the [mail-gem] tag so it was not obvious to search.

The answer points to the solution on the ruby-gem issues report https://github.com/mikel/mail/issues/258

Using Ruby Mail Gem to read Email subjects

Eventually found the answer with the aid of this table : https://i.stack.imgur.com/qbe46.png

Changing the if statement to if !(email == []) did the trick

Thanks, everyone for helping me think it through.

Reading a Gmail Message with ruby-gmail

This probably isn't exactly the answer to your question, but I will tell you what I have done in the past. I tried using the ruby-gmail gem but it didn't do what I wanted it to do in terms of reading a message. Or, at least, I couldn't get it to work. Instead I use the built-in Net::IMAP class to log in and get a message.

require 'net/imap'
imap = Net::IMAP.new('imap.gmail.com',993,true)
imap.login('<username>','<password>')
imap.select('INBOX')
subject_id = search_mail(imap, 'SUBJECT', '<mail_subject>')
subject_message = imap.fetch(subject_id,'RFC822')[0].attr['RFC822']
mail = Mail.read_from_string subject_message
body_message = mail.html_part.body

From here your message is stored in body_message and is HTML. If you want the entire email body you will probably need to learn how to use Nokogiri to parse it. If you just want a small bit of the message where you know some of the surrounding characters you can use a regex to find the part you are interested in.

I did find one page associated with the ruby-gmail gem that talks about using ruby-gmail to read a Gmail message. I made a cursory attempt at testing it tonight but apparently Google upped the security on my account and I couldn't get in using irb without tinkering with my Gmail configuration (according to the warning email I received). So I was unable to verify what is stated on that page, but as I mentioned my past attempts were unfruitful whereas Net::IMAP works for me.

EDIT:
I found this, which is pretty cool. You will need to add in

require 'cgi'

to your class.

I was able to implement it in this way. After I have my body_message, call the html2text method from that linked page (which I modified slightly and included below since you have to convert body_message to a string):

plain_text = html2text(body_message)
puts plain_text #Prints nicely formatted plain text to the terminal

Here is the slightly modified method:

def html2text(html)
  text = html.to_s.
    gsub(/( |\n|\s)+/im, ' ').squeeze(' ').strip.
    gsub(/<([^\s]+)[^>]*(src|href)=\s*(.?)([^>\s]*)\3[^>]*>\4<\/\1>/i,
'\4')

  links = []
  linkregex = /<[^>]*(src|href)=\s*(.?)([^>\s]*)\2[^>]*>\s*/i
  while linkregex.match(text)
    links << $~[3]
    text.sub!(linkregex, "[#{links.size}]")
  end

  text = CGI.unescapeHTML(
    text.
      gsub(/<(script|style)[^>]*>.*<\/\1>/im, '').
      gsub(/<!--.*-->/m, '').
      gsub(/<hr(| [^>]*)>/i, "___\n").
      gsub(/<li(| [^>]*)>/i, "\n* ").
      gsub(/<blockquote(| [^>]*)>/i, '> ').
      gsub(/<(br)(| [^>]*)>/i, "\n").
      gsub(/<(\/h[\d]+|p)(| [^>]*)>/i, "\n\n").
      gsub(/<[^>]*>/, '')
  ).lstrip.gsub(/\n[ ]+/, "\n") + "\n"

  for i in (0...links.size).to_a
    text = text + "\n  [#{i+1}] <#{CGI.unescapeHTML(links[i])}>" unless
links[i].nil?
  end
  links = nil
  text
end

You also mentioned in your original question that you got mumbo-jumbo with this step:

email.message *returns mumbo-jumbo*

If the mumbo-jumbo is HTML, you can probably just use your existing code with this html2text method instead of switching over to Net::IMAP as I had discussed when I posted my original answer.

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