Mail is an internet library for Ruby that is designed to handle email generation, parsing and sending in a simple, rubyesque manner.
The purpose of this library is to provide a single point of access to handle all email functions, including sending and receiving email. All network type actions are done through proxy methods to Net::SMTP, Net::POP3 etc.
Built from my experience with TMail, it is designed to be a pure ruby implementation that makes generating, sending and parsing email a no brainer.
It is also designed from the ground up to work with the more modern versions of Ruby. Modern Rubies handle text encodings much more wonderfully than before so these features have been taken full advantage of in this library allowing Mail to handle a lot more messages more cleanly than TMail.
Finally, Mail has been designed with a very simple object oriented system that really opens up the email messages you are parsing, if you know what you are doing, you can fiddle with every last bit of your email directly.
Yes, you! Mail is used in countless apps by people around the world. It is, like all open source software, a labour of love borne from our free time. If you would like to say thanks, please dig in and contribute alongside us! Triage and fix GitHub issues, improve our documentation, add new features—up to you! Thank you for pitching in.
- Compatibility
- Discussion
- Current Capabilities of Mail
- Roadmap
- Testing Policy
- API Policy
- Installation
- Encodings
- Contributing
- Usage
- Excerpts from TREC Spam Corpus 2005
- License
Mail is tested against:
- Ruby: 2.5
- Ruby: 2.6
- Ruby: 2.7
- Ruby: 3.0
- Ruby: 3.1
- Ruby: 3.2
- JRuby: 9.2
- JRuby: 9.3
- JRuby: 9.4
- JRuby: stable
- JRuby: head
- Truffleruby: stable
- Truffleruby: head
As new versions of Ruby are released, Mail will be compatible with support for the "preview" and all "normal maintenance", "security maintenance" and the two most recent "end of life" versions listed at the Ruby Maintenance Branches page. Pull requests to assist in adding support for new preview releases are more than welcome.
Every Mail commit is tested by GitHub Actions on all supported Ruby versions.
If you want to discuss mail with like minded individuals, please subscribe to the Google Group.
- RFC5322 Support, Reading and Writing
- RFC6532 Support, reading UTF-8 headers
- RFC2045-2049 Support for multipart email
- Support for creating multipart alternate email
- Support for reading multipart/report email & getting details from such
- Wrappers for File, Net/POP3, Net/SMTP
- Auto-encoding of non-US-ASCII bodies and header fields
Mail is RFC5322 and RFC6532 compliant now, that is, it can parse US-ASCII and UTF-8 email and generate US-ASCII email. There are a few obsoleted email syntax that it will have problems with, but it also is quite robust, meaning, if it finds something it doesn't understand it will not crash, instead, it will skip the problem and keep parsing. In the case of a header it doesn't understand, it will initialise the header as an optional unstructured field and continue parsing.
This means Mail won't (ever) crunch your data (I think).
You can also create MIME emails. There are helper methods for making a multipart/alternate email for text/plain and text/html (the most common pair) and you can manually create any other type of MIME email.
Next TODO:
- Improve MIME support for character sets in headers, currently works, mostly, needs refinement.
Basically... we do BDD on Mail. No method gets written in Mail without a corresponding or covering spec. We expect as a minimum 100% coverage measured by RCov. While this is not perfect by any measure, it is pretty good. Additionally, all functional tests from TMail are to be passing before the gem gets released.
It also means you can be sure Mail will behave correctly.
You can run tests locally by running bundle exec rspec.
You can run tests on all supported Ruby versions by using act.
No API removals within a single point release. All removals to be deprecated with warnings for at least one MINOR point release before removal.
Also, all private or protected methods to be declared as such - though this is still I/P.
Installation is fairly simple, I host mail on rubygems, so you can just do:
# gem install mail
If you didn't know, handling encodings in Emails is not as straight forward as you would hope.
I have tried to simplify it some:
-
All objects that can render into an email, have an
#encodedmethod. Encoded will return the object as a complete string ready to send in the mail system, that is, it will include the header field and value and CRLF at the end and wrapped as needed. -
All objects that can render into an email, have a
#decodedmethod. Decoded will return the object's "value" only as a string. This means it will not include the header fields (like 'To:' or 'Subject:'). -
By default, calling
#to_son a container object will call its encoded method, while#to_son a field object will call its decoded method. So calling#to_son a Mail object will return the mail, all encoded ready to send, while calling#to_son the From field or the body will return the decoded value of the object. The header object of Mail is considered a container. If you are in doubt, call#encoded, or#decodedexplicitly, this is safer if you are not sure. -
Structured fields that have parameter values that can be encoded (e.g. Content-Type) will provide decoded parameter values when you call the parameter names as methods against the object.
-
Structured fields that have parameter values that can be encoded (e.g. Content-Type) will provide encoded parameter values when you call the parameter names through the
object.parameters['<parameter_name>']method call.
Please do! Contributing is easy in Mail. Please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document for more info.
All major mail functions should be able to happen from the Mail module.
So, you should be able to just require 'mail' to get started.
mail is pretty well documented in its Ruby code. You can look it up e.g. at rubydoc.info.
mail = Mail.new do
from '[email protected]'
to '[email protected]'
subject 'This is a test email'
body File.read('body.txt')
end
mail.to_s #=> "From: [email protected]\r\nTo: you@...mail = Mail.new do
body File.read('body.txt')
end
mail['from'] = '[email protected]'
mail[:to] = '[email protected]'
mail.subject = 'This is a test email'
mail.header['X-Custom-Header'] = 'custom value'
mail.to_s #=> "From: [email protected]\r\nTo: you@...mail = Mail.new do
to '[email protected]'
body 'Some simple body'
end
mail.to_s =~ /Message\-ID: <[\d\w_]+@.+.mail/ #=> 27Mail will automatically add a Message-ID field if it is missing and give it a unique, random Message-ID along the lines of:
mail = Mail.new do
to '[email protected]'
message_id '<[email protected]>'
body 'Some simple body'
end
mail.to_s =~ /Message\-ID: <[email protected]>/ #=> 27Mail will take the message_id you assign to it trusting that you know what you are doing.
Mail defaults to sending via SMTP to local host port 25. If you have a sendmail or postfix daemon running on this port, sending email is as easy as:
Mail.deliver do
from '[email protected]'
to '[email protected]'
subject 'Here is the image you wanted'
body File.read('body.txt')
add_file '/full/path/to/somefile.png'
endor
mail = Mail.new do
from '[email protected]'
to '[email protected]'
subject 'Here is the image you wanted'
body File.read('body.txt')
add_file :filename => 'somefile.png', :content => File.read('/somefile.png')
end
mail.deliver!Sending via sendmail can be done like so:
mail = Mail.new do
from '[email protected]'
to '[email protected]'
subject 'Here is the image you wanted'
body File.read('body.txt')
add_file :filename => 'somefile.png', :content => File.read('/somefile.png')
end
mail.delivery_method :sendmail
mail.deliverSending via smtp (for example to mailcatcher)
Mail.defaults do
delivery_method :smtp, address: "localhost", port: 1025
endExim requires its own delivery manager, and can be used like so:
mail.delivery_method :exim, :location => "/usr/bin/exim"
mail.deliverMail may be "delivered" to a logfile, too, for development and testing:
# Delivers by logging the encoded message to $stdout
mail.delivery_method :logger
# Delivers to an existing logger at :debug severity
mail.delivery_method :logger, logger: other_logger, severity: :debugYou can configure Mail to receive email using retriever_method
within Mail.defaults:
# e.g. POP3
Mail.defaults do
retriever_method :pop3, :address => "pop.gmail.com",
:port => 995,
:user_name => '<username>',
:password => '<password>',
:enable_ssl => true
end
# IMAP
Mail.defaults do
retriever_method :imap, :address => "imap.mailbox.org",
:port => 993,
:user_name => '<username>',
:password => '<password>',
:enable_ssl => true
endYou can access incoming email in a number of ways.
The most recent email:
Mail.all #=> Returns an array of all emails
Mail.first #=> Returns the first unread email
Mail.last #=> Returns the last unread emailThe first 10 emails sorted by date in ascending order:
emails = Mail.find(:what => :first, :count => 10, :order => :asc)
emails.length #=> 10Or even all emails:
emails = Mail.all
emails.length #=> LOTS!mail = Mail.read('/path/to/message.eml')
mail.envelope_from #=> '[email protected]'
mail.from.addresses #=> ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']
mail.sender.address #=> '[email protected]'
mail.to #=> '[email protected]'
mail.cc #=> '[email protected]'
mail.subject #=> "This is the subject"
mail.date.to_s #=> '21 Nov 1997 09:55:06 -0600'
mail.message_id #=> '<[email protected]>'
mail.decoded #=> 'This is the body of the email...Many more methods available.
mail = Mail.read('multipart_email')
mail.multipart? #=> true
mail.parts.length #=> 2
mail.body.preamble #=> "Text before the first part"
mail.body.epilogue #=> "Text after the last part"
mail.parts.map { |p| p.content_type } #=> ['text/plain', 'application/pdf']
mail.parts.map { |p| p.class } #=> [Mail::Message, Mail::Message]
mail.parts[0].content_type_parameters #=> {'charset' => 'ISO-8859-1'}
mail.parts[1].content_type_parameters #=> {'name' => 'my.pdf'}Mail generates a tree of parts. Each message has many or no parts. Each part is another message which can have many or no parts.
A message will only have parts if it is a multipart/mixed or multipart/related content type and has a boundary defined.
mail.attachments.each do | attachment |
# Attachments is an AttachmentsList object containing a
# number of Part objects
if (attachment.content_type.start_with?('image/'))
# extracting images for example...
filename = attachment.filename
begin
File.open(images_dir + filename, "w+b", 0644) {|f| f.write attachment.decoded}
rescue => e
puts "Unable to save data for #{filename} because #{e.message}"
end
end
endMail makes some basic assumptions and makes doing the common thing as simple as possible.... (asking a lot from a mail library)
mail = Mail.deliver do
part :content_type => "multipart/mixed" do |p1|
p1.part :content_type => "multipart/related" do |p2|
p2.part :content_type => "multipart/alternative",
:content_disposition => "inline" do |p3|
p3.part :content_type => "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
:body => "Here is the attachment you wanted\n"
p3.part :content_type => "text/html; charset=utf-8",
:body => "<h1>Funky Title</h1><p>Here is the attachment you wanted</p>\n"
end
end
add_file '/path/to/myfile.pdf'
end
from "Mikel Lindsaar <[email protected]>"
to "[email protected]"
subject "First multipart email sent with Mail"
endMail then delivers the email at the end of the block and returns the resulting Mail::Message object, which you can then inspect if you so desire...
puts mail.to_s #=>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2022 20:12:07 +0200
From: Mikel Lindsaar <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Subject: First multipart email sent with Mail
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=\"--==_mimepart_626835f733867_10873fdfa3c2ffd494636\";
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
----==_mimepart_626835f733867_10873fdfa3c2ffd494636
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=\"--==_mimepart_626835f73382a_10873fdfa3c2ffd494518\";
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
----==_mimepart_626835f73382a_10873fdfa3c2ffd494518
Content-Type: multipart/related;
boundary=\"--==_mimepart_626835f7337f5_10873fdfa3c2ffd494438\";
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
----==_mimepart_626835f7337f5_10873fdfa3c2ffd494438
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=\"--==_mimepart_626835f733702_10873fdfa3c2ffd494376\";
charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-ID: <[email protected]>
----==_mimepart_626835f733702_10873fdfa3c2ffd494376
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Here is the attachment you wanted
----==_mimepart_626835f733702_10873fdfa3c2ffd494376
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<h1>Funky Title</h1><p>Here is the attachment you wanted</p>
----==_mimepart_626835f733702_10873fdfa3c2ffd494376--
----==_mimepart_626835f7337f5_10873fdfa3c2ffd494438--
----==_mimepart_626835f73382a_10873fdfa3c2ffd494518--
----==_mimepart_626835f733867_10873fdfa3c2ffd494636
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=UTF-8;
filename=myfile.txt
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=myfile.txt
Content-ID: <6
[email protected]>
Hallo,
Test
End
----==_mimepart_626835f733867_10873fdfa3c2ffd494636--
Mail inserts the content transfer encoding, the mime version, the content-IDs and handles the content-type and boundary.
Mail assumes that if your text in the body is only us-ascii, that your transfer encoding is 7bit and it is text/plain. You can override this by explicitly declaring it.
You don't have to use a block with the text and html part included, you can just do it declaratively. However, you need to add Mail::Parts to an email, not Mail::Messages.
mail = Mail.new do
to '[email protected]'
from 'Mikel Lindsaar <[email protected]>'
subject 'First multipart email sent with Mail'
end
text_part = Mail::Part.new do
body 'This is plain text'
end
html_part = Mail::Part.new do
content_type 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
body '<h1>This is HTML</h1>'
end
mail.text_part = text_part
mail.html_part = html_partResults in the same email as done using the block form
@mail = Mail.read('/path/to/bounce_message.eml')
@mail.bounced? #=> true
@mail.final_recipient #=> rfc822;[email protected]
@mail.action #=> failed
@mail.error_status #=> 5.5.0
@mail.diagnostic_code #=> smtp;550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
@mail.retryable? #=> falseYou can just read the file off an absolute path, Mail will try to guess the mime_type and will encode the file in Base64 for you.
@mail = Mail.new
@mail.add_file("/path/to/file.jpg")
@mail.parts.first.attachment? #=> true
@mail.parts.first.content_transfer_encoding.to_s #=> 'base64'
@mail.attachments.first.mime_type #=> 'image/jpg'
@mail.attachments.first.filename #=> 'file.jpg'
@mail.attachments.first.decoded == File.read('/path/to/file.jpg') #=> trueOr You can pass in file_data and give it a filename, again, mail will try and guess the mime_type for you.
@mail = Mail.new
@mail.attachments['myfile.pdf'] = File.read('path/to/myfile.pdf')
@mail.parts.first.attachment? #=> true
@mail.attachments.first.mime_type #=> 'application/pdf'
@mail.attachments.first.decoded == File.read('path/to/myfile.pdf') #=> trueYou can also override the guessed MIME media type if you really know better than mail (this should be rarely needed)
@mail = Mail.new
@mail.attachments['myfile.pdf'] = { :mime_type => 'application/x-pdf',
:content => File.read('path/to/myfile.pdf') }
@mail.parts.first.mime_type #=> 'application/x-pdf'Of course... Mail will round trip an attachment as well
@mail = Mail.new do
to '[email protected]'
from 'Mikel Lindsaar <[email protected]>'
subject 'First multipart email sent with Mail'
text_part do
body 'Here is the attachment you wanted'
end
html_part do
content_type 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
body '<h1>Funky Title</h1><p>Here is the attachment you wanted</p>'
end
add_file '/path/to/myfile.pdf'
end
@round_tripped_mail = Mail.new(@mail.encoded)
@round_tripped_mail.attachments.length #=> 1
@round_tripped_mail.attachments.first.filename #=> 'myfile.pdf'See "Testing and extracting attachments" above for more details.
If mail is part of your system, you'll need a way to test it without actually sending emails, the TestMailer can do this for you.
require 'mail'
=> true
Mail.defaults do
delivery_method :test
end
=> #<Mail::Configuration:0x19345a8 @delivery_method=Mail::TestMailer>
Mail::TestMailer.deliveries
=> []
Mail.deliver do
to '[email protected]'
from '[email protected]'
subject 'testing'
body 'hello'
end
=> #<Mail::Message:0x19284ec ...
Mail::TestMailer.deliveries.length
=> 1
Mail::TestMailer.deliveries.first
=> #<Mail::Message:0x19284ec ...
Mail::TestMailer.deliveries.clear
=> []There is also a set of RSpec matchers stolen/inspired by Shoulda's ActionMailer matchers (you'll want to set delivery_method as above too):
Mail.defaults do
delivery_method :test # in practice you'd do this in spec_helper.rb
end
RSpec.describe "sending an email" do
include Mail::Matchers
before(:each) do
Mail::TestMailer.deliveries.clear
Mail.deliver do
to ['[email protected]', '[email protected]']
from '[email protected]'
subject 'testing'
body 'hello'
end
end
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email } # passes if any email at all was sent
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.from('[email protected]') }
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.to('[email protected]') }
# can specify a list of recipients...
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.to(['[email protected]', '[email protected]']) }
# ...or chain recipients together
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.to('[email protected]').to('[email protected]') }
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_subject('testing') }
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_body('hello') }
# Can match subject or body with a regex
# (or anything that responds_to? :match)
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.matching_subject(/test(ing)?/) }
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.matching_body(/h(a|e)llo/) }
# Can chain together modifiers
# Note that apart from recipients, repeating a modifier overwrites old value.
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.from('[email protected]').to('[email protected]').matching_body(/hell/)
# test for attachments
# ... by specific attachment
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_attachments(my_attachment) }
# ... or any attachment
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_attachments(any_attachment) }
# ... or attachment with filename
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_attachments(an_attachment_with_filename('file.txt')) }
# ... or attachment with mime_type
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_attachments(an_attachment_with_mime_type('application/pdf')) }
# ... by array of attachments
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_attachments([my_attachment1, my_attachment2]) } #note that order is important
#... by presence
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_any_attachments }
#... or by absence
it { is_expected.to have_sent_email.with_no_attachments }
endThe spec fixture files in spec/fixtures/emails/from_trec_2005 are from the 2005 TREC Public Spam Corpus. They remain copyrighted under the terms of that project and license agreement. They are used in this project to verify and describe the development of this email parser implementation.
http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/
They are used as allowed by 'Permitted Uses, Clause 3':
"Small excerpts of the information may be displayed to others
or published in a scientific or technical context, solely for
the purpose of describing the research and development and
related issues."
-- http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) 2009-2016 Mikel Lindsaar
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
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