So today I got to build a small little application that does the following:

  • It reads a specific email account through the IMAP protocol
  • Imports the message and all of it’s attachments
  • Saves the message to a postgres database
  • Marks the message as read
  • Copies the message to the Complete folder
  • Removes the message from the Inbox

So why did I do this? Well, I really want a simple way to post messages from my phone to my blog. Gmail currently allows me to work on drafts while on the move and will push when I resume connectivity. Hopefully this will result in a vast increase in the number of posts I make in the future.

All of this was down to the Ruby IMAP library and Mikel Lindsaars awesome Mail library. You can view the source code of this website at https://github.com/beilabs/www.beilabs.com *This blog is now replaced with a simplified Jekyll blog framework.

There are still a number of things to do such as:

  • Read and process attachments
  • Save to Amazon S3