CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsimap
Merc
Merc

Reputation: 17097

Fetching all unseen email (body + attachment) with node-imap

I am writing a simple software that needs to:

I am reading https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap; however, a message can be in multiple parts, and that's where I am lost. For example, when it's multi-part, what is the part that is guaranteed to be the actual email body?

Or, even better, is there a wrapper out there that will just return a nice "message" object, all neatly fetched and prepared for me? Something with the usual headers (from, to, etc.), to body, and a bunch of pre-decoded attachment?

Merc.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3255

Answers (1)

arnt
arnt

Reputation: 9685

To answer the good part of your question: No part is guaranteed to be "the email body", you can legally send a message without text. I've seen software that'll send attachment-only mail when the user adds an attachment but leaves the mail body field empty. The way to distinguish between inline bodies and attachments is to look at the content-disposition field, and if that's not present, assume inline for text/* and attachment for other types. (Yes, this also means that there may be more than one inline body. Apple Mail is fond of sending that, for instance.)

The other part of your question is a FAQ and an easy one, and yes, there's much software to build that message object. Approximately 100% of client libraries can do that. Search your documentation for "bodystructure", that's the name of the IMAP fetch item they retrieve and parse in order to build the structure you want.

Upvotes: 1

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