Receiving emails and attachments with Rails

Does your Rails app need to handle incoming emails with the attachments? All of the examples I’ve seen so far show you how to insert email attachments into the DB. Here’s a quick example that uses RailsCron to poll a POP3 account every minute for new emails and stores the attachments on the filesystem. If you need help using or running RailsCron see my previous posts about the topic.

The Agile book has a good example that kicks off a runner script but I think this method is far more efficient than having your mail system kick off a separate runner every time a new email is received, especially if you’re dealing in high volume.

It also handles non-responsive or slow responding POP3 servers by setting a high timeout length and retrying a handful of times before it gives up.

http://naffis.com/2006/8/14/receiving-emails-and-attachments-with-rails