CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsparsingemailruby-on-rails-3
Emil Hajric
Emil Hajric

Reputation: 720

RAILS: How to strip contents of an email(signature, etc) from an E-mail body?

I'm wondering how I'd strip the contents of an email and perhaps do gmail-like threading when I have the email body html returned in ruby on rails.

For example, the following text is sent to my app: 

Hey XYZ, 

I've fixed that error and tested it a couple of times, it seems to be working fine now.

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Joe David <[email protected]> wrote:
Initial thread starts here... 

-- 
Thanks
[email protected]

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1403

Answers (1)

rlkw1024
rlkw1024

Reputation: 6515

Email format is a tricky thing. You could use find the boundaries between emails using a regex that detects strings like On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Joe David <[email protected]> wrote:. But you can't guarantee that all incoming messages will have a string like that between emails.

Another option is to check for the > character, which may appear at the beginning of each quoted line. However, once again, you have to worry about what happens if you receive a message that doesn't follow this convention.

Yet another option--and I think Gmail does this--is to look for matches between the incoming message and previous messages. I.e. if you see Initial thread starts here...Thanks, [email protected] in the message, and you also have that in a previous message in your database, you could infer that it's a quote from earlier in the thread.

Upvotes: 2

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