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how's everyone hanging in there I know it's I know it's day two so is everyone everyone's still feeling
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okay uh you all are aware that you're in a talk about inbound emails too
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everyone's in the right place okay just check so first off um just like to say
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thank you to uh the organizers and all the volunteers for for putting this on um I live here in Colorado uh not
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necessarily local but this is about as local as it gets for me so combining Colorado and Ruby uh are are really two
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of my favorite things and bringing people in and being able to share that uh is something I'm very thankful for so
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thank you for having me out to speak and thank you to all of you for making it I know people are uh different countries
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different states um some people's first conference so um yeah thank you for making it out and thank you for sitting
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here listening to uh some inbound email parsing thought so a little bit about me uh my
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name is Cody Norman uh I'm an independent Ruby consultant uh and I live in a small mountain town here in
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Colorado uh called Bailey so another thing about
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me I really love email and and I know this Probably
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sounds a little bit odd but email is such a powerful and flexible tool for
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users to be able to interact with your application in a way that they're most comfortable
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with but sometimes relationships can be
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complicated so as I stand Here speaking to all you lovely folks today uh I'm sure you also
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are getting deeper and deeper and deeper in emails despite their usefulness there's
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a lot of different emails uh fighting for your attention so it's very easy uh to get overwhelmed so maybe a better way
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to put this is I'm in love with the idea of
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email so today I'll be covering uh how we can use a framework in rails called
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action mailbox to parse inbound emails uh I will show a couple of
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different practical use cases uh we'll go over how you can send these inbound emails to your application uh how
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they're processed and some tips for uh running and deploying this in
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production so first off what is it uh one of the most common things that I hear from people is I've heard about
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action mailbox but that's usually about it uh most people don't really know about it but a simple explanation is uh
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action malm will route inbound emails uh to controller like mailboxes for processing in your rails
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app your application will create an inbound email record that will be later
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picked up and processed in the background with active job so this provides us with a really
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familiar and intuitive way uh to handle and parse these emails and still have it
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feel like rails so basically this gives us an
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endpoint that will accept request data uh save it process it in the background
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and this is something that anyone in the world can submit to without requiring an account verification API key uh everyone
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can just send we don't need a lot of the overhead that you normally have with your typical
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application so since most people don't really know uh much about action mailbox or have never really worked with it uh I
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have a few practical examples uh to show you some ways that I've uh used it in the past and hopefully give you uh some
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more ideas to to take away for ways that you may be able to use it in your own
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application so the first example this is probably uh the most common one this was one of the first ones that I I set up
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and uh has been one of the most helpful ones uh by far so this is uh an example of how we
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would do something like parsing a PDF attachment that was sent in the inbound email uh creating a legacy document
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which which is a model that I have set up in the application uh and then create a active storage attachment from the
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attachment in the inbound email things like embedded images or
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signatures uh can be an issue so this is a slightly abbreviated example uh but
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we're able to do one of the most common tasks for applications uh all through email uh we also have the benefit of not
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choking up our web server if someone tries to upload uh a obscenely large PDF
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document which I'm sure most of you have ran into at some point so this is also going to process it in the background uh
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we don't need views we don't need to worry about error handling uh and again this is a way that the users can feel
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more comfortable be able to get the functionality and accomplish their task
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without even having to log in or even see your application at all
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and here we have a example of a lightweight email to SMS service so for this example you would
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include your number uh you would like to send the text message to uh in the subject of the email and the message you
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would like to send in the body so just like that we have a uh Standalone
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mailbox uh converting one channel to another uh all in just a few lines of uh
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Ruby code
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with action mmox we can also create our very own AI wrapper application so this would be an example
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of uh sending an inbound email uh parsing out the body contents of the email uh sending it to open AI uh I'm
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sure whichever version uh is up there is way outd at this point uh but this did work at some
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point and these are a few different examples of uh how we can show the
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diverse and really targeted functionality that we can accomplish with action
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mailbox so this was a new mailbox uh actually set up for a demo production app uh that's been running live the past
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couple days uh some of you may have interacted with it um some of you may have not but uh basically I had it set
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up to where uh we had Easter eggs and would also send you out informational emails and this breaks it down a little
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bit uh how all that would work so someone would email food at inbound.
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action mailbox. proo or coffee and receive a transactional email back with uh options within a 10-minute
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walk from E toown the Easter egg was in the reply to
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for the outbound email so if someone replied to the email they would either go to winter winter lunch or dinner or
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death before decaf at the application sign uh the first one to email in uh
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would receive a gift card back and if you figured out the Easter egg and you tried to email back in afterwards uh you
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would see that the promotion or the deal has already
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expired and this is the actual code uh that was running uh the production app
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so uh this is not cleaned up uh as much as I would like it to be uh but with uh
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3 or four days of Live use in a production environment um and a handful of gross if El statements uh we were
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able to uh add a um a usable and functional feature that didn't require
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people to sign up or confirm their email uh they were just able to interact with it and then get the benefit from
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it so now that you have a two different ideas of ways you can use action mailbox
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in your application let's let's take a look at what happens when an inbound email is sent and how it's going to be
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processed to your rails application so this is the overall flow
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of what happens when an inbound email is sent to uh your uh mail
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provider if you look at the documentation they uh will refer to this as an Ingress um I'll be using Ingress
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and email service provider a little interchangeably here uh just because I feel most people have a better idea of
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email service provider so uh for this example we send the inbound email
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postmark or your chosen provider will receive it they do a little bit of processing send an inbound web hook to
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your rails application uh then we authorize it uh we create a new action
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mailbox inbound email it's routed and then finally sent to the mailbox for process
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so taking a little deeper look into some of the steps here um it all begins with sending an inbound email uh and again
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this is done with your chosen mail client so uh we don't have to worry about browser compatibility or a lot of
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the other things that you may run into with typical applications we also have the benefit of leveraging email uh so
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things like offline messages or sending or receiving whenever you reconnect uh
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are all kind of handled automatically by your email
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client so after your service provider receives the email uh each one is a little bit different typically they'll
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do a little bit of processing uh and then send the web hook request with the data to your rails
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application because it all web hook based uh in a pinch uh you can actually
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upload a INR or some other Tye some other type of uh secure shell uh to
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allow the actual mail service to send this these inbound emails to your local environment so it gives us tools that
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we're comfortable with uh and that we're we're all able to work with uh in a pretty familiar
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way and this is the point where the rails application actually takes over and will handle everything throughout
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the rest of the process so the application receives the
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hook uh if you see here at the bottom uh we see action mailbox colon and then password uh this is how the web hook
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will authenticate the request so we set this value in uh either the encrypted
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credentials or you could set an environment variable uh that maps to that
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password so now that you all are so excited about action mailbox
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right yeah I I could tell by the laughs uh so to get started uh again it's a really familiar rails process uh we run
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the generators then we will uh set up our routing to tell it how to deliver it to a specific mailbox and then implement
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the Parson modu like most great rails tools uh we
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have uh some nice generators uh to get everything set up and installed um this
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is pretty much it so in two commands uh we can get 80% of the way to having a
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working uh inbound email parsing application uh bolted on to our existing
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rails app or for new rails
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application one thing that I I see tripping a lot of people up um if you notice here after we run the uh install
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command uh you may notice that active storage is installed and the reason for
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that is action mailbox will save the raw data from the inbound email request as
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an active storage attachment and I've noticed this catches a lot of people off guard and uh can be
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responsible for for some odd issues uh once you move everything to production uh but I'll I'll have a little bit more
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on that uh towards the
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end so this is one of the uh migrations that gets created uh after running our
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generator and this is the uh kind of the bread and butter of the uh action
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mailbox application this creates the inbound emails table and looking at
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everything it's pretty straightforward um for something like email I feel like most people kind of write it off as is
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weird or complicated or um something that doesn't feel like they're used to
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but looking at this um we just have a status which will tell you whether it needs to be processed whether it's
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bounced a message ID to ensure that each me message is going to be unique
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and uh don't see it here but uh there's also the raw data attachment that
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attaches the uh email data to the inbound email
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object besides of migrations uh running the generators will also create a application mailbox for you this is
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where all the routing for our emails will take place so you'll see uh the
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generated file uh includes a commented out example of how you would match and
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Route One of These inbound emails to a specific
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mailbox so once everything is set up uh we have everything in place to begin generating these individual mailboxes
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that's going to contain the business Logic for actually parsing out the email
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now everything is going to take place within the process method um and if you've ever worked with active job uh
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it's going to feel really similar uh we have a lot of the same benefits like uh before Hooks and everything is kind of
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contained within this process method so again we're sticking to patterns that uh feel really comfortable and uh familiar
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to most rails Developers
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so moving on to the next step here uh once the uh your application has
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received the inbound email uh it will actually process it asynchronously so we
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we won't be processing the email right away what happens is we save the inbound
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email uh the bulk of the the data is stored in the Raw data attachment which is from active storage and then we enq a
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job to be processed later
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and this is where a lot of the magic happens um one of my favorite things is the fact that uh a model that's
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responsible for the majority functionality for this uh subf framework in rails can fit on a single
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slide so let's look into a little more detail about some of these different
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sections so after our table definition uh we have a few different concerns
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being included here the first one uh incinerable will ensure that the inbound
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email uh is scheduled for incineration uh whenever the status has been changed to
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processed so because these because the inbound emails are stored as an active
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storage attachment uh this is going to automatically make sure that your S3 bucket uh doesn't overflow with emails
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after however long you've had it running so within 30 days the raw data from the attach from
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the email uh will be automatically deleted and cleaned up so one less thing you have to worry
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about and again the message ID is um uh to ensure that there's a unique
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identifier for each email uh this is how we uh can identify one email and Link
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them to others and be able to determine if it's a reply to a single email or
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part of a longer thread or chain of emails
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and finally the routable concern uh is what handles routing the inbound email
00:17:07.919
to our mailbox and then finally delivering it to its final destination in the mailbox for
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processing so here's the raw email uh active storage attachment I mentioned
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earlier um so this is uh going to be stored from the uh mail data that gets
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sent from the email service provider uh it's pretty equivalent to uh if you've ever worked with the Ruby mail object uh
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just calling mail. 2s so if you see all that out output that's basically what we're going to save in this raw email
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active storage attachment you can see we also have uh we're specifying the service here so uh
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if say you want to use uh maybe a less durable or cheaper solution just for parsing these emails uh we can also set
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this up uh to go to a specific Destin a and not have to worry about it uh dealing with our main active storage
00:18:03.720
service that we may have set
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up and here are a few examples of how you might use uh some of the methods that were defined in this
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class so if we call Raw email this is going to return the active storage
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attachment created from the raw email data so Source will um convert the raw
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email data uh to a string uh and this is really helpful because this will allow us to pass it into the rails conductor
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uh which has a source option so we can hand it a giant uh blob of text that
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basically maps to the email and it will simulate it sending to our uh application in our development
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environment and for mail when we're in the context of the actual mailbox uh
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calling mail just returns a normal mail message in Ruby so this would be the same one that you use in uh uh active
00:19:06.600
mailer or uh any other mail service that you may have interacted with or or had to use with Ruby
00:19:17.840
before so now we have a little bit more background on the action mailbox inbound
00:19:23.000
email and how it's created let's look at how the inbound email will be routed to the mailbox for its final
00:19:30.679
processing so again the the job is uh added and created After we receive the inbound email and processed in the
00:19:44.799
background your uh application mailbox is basically like the post office for
00:19:50.480
your action mailbox app it's going to receive all of your inbound emails and decide uh where and how to route it to
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its final destination uh this is actual uh a a real example
00:20:02.919
from a snippet of the public uh the public mailboxes for the uh production
00:20:08.200
app that I set up so one of the things that you may notice
00:20:14.520
um we're using uh a pretty light regex for most of these options but at the
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bottom here we're using the All method so this ensures that if we don't have a match by the time we get to the
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bottom uh any and all email that get to that point will be routed to the promotions so this is a great way to set
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up something like a a catchall mailbox or an unroutable email mailbox uh to
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ensure that whenever you do get these emails uh you can at least have some type of manual intervention before
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Markin them is bounced or failed or whatever so this gives us a way to capture everything and be able to uh
00:20:53.559
kind of Ruby our way out of a problem if we need to
00:21:03.840
so after we route the inbound email to the mailbox uh this is when we begin the actual business logic or processing of
00:21:11.120
the email and this is where all the magic
00:21:17.600
happens uh everything is going to be contained within that single process method and uh again if you've worked
00:21:24.039
with active job this is going to feel very familiar uh has a lot of the same life cycle hooks then we can run uh
00:21:30.840
either before or after the processing of the email to ensure that all of our data is either set up correctly or torn down
00:21:40.679
correctly action mailbox also provides us with a really handy method uh called Bounce with and what this will do this
00:21:48.240
will automatically Mark the inbound email is bounced so we don't try to reprocess it uh it also gives us a uh
00:21:54.799
easy way to query for any type of inbound email it may have bounced and it takes a uh rails mailer and uses
00:22:03.440
that mailer to reply back to the sender to alert them of the bounce so again we have a one a nice oneliner to Mark the
00:22:11.360
email as bounce and also alert the sender of the status of the the failed to
00:22:21.080
email so here's an example of how you might combine the before processing life
00:22:26.279
cycle hook uh with the bounce width method so this is a uh pretty common use case
00:22:32.400
um action mailbox is great but you may not want to randomly accept attachments from anyone who emails into you so for
00:22:40.720
this example uh before we do any processing in the mailbox uh this insure
00:22:46.080
user method is going to run so for this we're going to parse out the uh sender
00:22:52.039
email address and we're going to see if we have a valid user from it and if not uh we're going to use the bounce width
00:22:58.080
method passes the mailer uh and mark the email is bounced and alert the sender all in
00:23:03.520
one
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line what good is a toy without batteries now that you all know so much about action mail moox you're going to
00:23:16.000
want to deploy it somewhere and R provides some great
00:23:21.840
options uh right out of the box there's also uh some third party gems available
00:23:27.120
for other services like Amazon sces uh but these ingresses um are basically a
00:23:33.480
collection of controllers that are specific to the provider and allowing you to focus on the business logic so
00:23:40.600
you don't have to reimplement everything uh if you decide to switch mail providers uh basically at any
00:23:52.840
time so now that we're deploying our action mailbox app to production uh there's a few potential pitfalls that uh
00:24:00.200
you may want to watch out for so the first one because the inbound
00:24:05.720
email is stored as an active storage attachment um uh your active storage URL
00:24:12.039
options uh won't be set by default so if you're trying to create a new attachment or return some type of Link um normally
00:24:19.039
the active storage um URL options are are set somewh your application controller but since we're processing
00:24:25.480
the email in the context of a of a job uh many times that value isn't set so
00:24:31.000
checking to make sure that your active storage URL options are set before you try to generate new attachments or send
00:24:37.960
those out uh is an easy way to save yourself a lot of
00:24:43.080
headaches another option is you'll probably want to set up something besides disk for your active storage
00:24:49.960
service um most of the time this will be issues if you're deploying your application to somewhere like Heroku uh
00:24:56.440
especially if you're running sidekick uh and background so uh whenever the inbound email is processed it's going to
00:25:02.000
look for the uh actual file that's on your web Dyno so it won't be able to find it and it'll throw an err and you
00:25:09.760
pull your hair out and wonder why you can't get this thing to work personal
00:25:16.159
experience uh the other uh big tip that uh I really suggest to everyone um is
00:25:22.000
right from the beginning uh plan on routing your inbound emails through some type of subdomain uh this can really be
00:25:28.960
anything but it makes it much easier to diagnose
00:25:35.000
uh any type of uh DNS issues that you may be running into when setting everything up and it also prevents
00:25:42.279
yourself from breaking your existing MX records and not having your email work
00:25:47.640
again personal
00:25:54.960
experience so we've covered some practical examples but this being a ruby
00:26:01.039
conference I thought it would be only proper to send people away with some impractical
00:26:07.679
examples so what follows are some of the uh goofiest impractical and weird ideas
00:26:15.840
I could possibly think of and get working uh around inbound emails so I hope this uh one gives you
00:26:24.399
all a little bit of entertainment but uh really I I hope this Sparks my is for some ways that you can take away and
00:26:30.880
maybe relate it to your own application uh to create your own features weird or
00:26:40.919
not okay this one is actually live uh very lightly tested uh
00:26:47.399
but uh catfax on demand uh this QR code should should work uh but by sending an
00:26:54.919
inbound email to Cat-Back inbound . action mailbox Pro uh
00:27:00.720
will make a request to a catfax API take the response and then email it back to
00:27:10.200
you and this is what that would look like uh in the context of the the actual
00:27:17.640
mailbox so not only a handful of lines uh we're able to create our very own automated catfax as a service platform
00:27:25.919
um I'm still waiting for funding if anyone has leads you can let me know
00:27:34.720
afterwards the age guesser um it always seems to guess
00:27:42.039
older so just this is not something I uh personally sent up but this will uh
00:27:47.760
reach out to the agfi API and uh try to guess your age based
00:27:53.480
on your email and how we do that is uh this will actually parse out the display name for
00:28:00.240
your email so if you have that set up uh we'll try to pull that out and if not we're going to uh we're going to split
00:28:06.200
the string of the email address and we're going to take the first portion so we at least have something to send
00:28:14.440
over and again this is a uh live mailbox this is the exact code uh that should be
00:28:20.000
interacting with the email address that you all would send in but we uh
00:28:28.919
uh we make the request with HTTP party we have our URL and at the bottom here
00:28:34.799
this name method uh we have we're going to try two
00:28:39.840
different ways to try to pull out the display name so the first one you'll see this is male and then we're passing a
00:28:46.200
bracket with from uh this is a male field which is a
00:28:51.559
little bit different than some of the other uh mail methods that you may run into uh but this is how we uh can parse
00:28:58.559
out just see first and the last name if you have that set in your email and we send that out so this is a way that we
00:29:05.760
can get additional information from the user without requiring them to to do
00:29:10.919
anything extra all they have to do is send an email and we're going to do our best to figure out their name and then
00:29:17.960
send it send it to the API for a guess and then reply back
00:29:28.279
this is where it starts to get more and more impractical uh mail yourself a postcard
00:29:34.799
reminder so I don't know if any of you have uh maybe emailed yourself a
00:29:39.880
reminder or a note or something at a conference and then by the time you get home it's it's way way down in your
00:29:45.760
inbox and you can't really find it this takes the Impractical approach
00:29:50.960
this one's not set up live but this takes the Impractical approach of parsing at the body uh of
00:29:58.080
your reminder email and we'll actually send a physical postcard to your
00:30:05.480
house so now we're taking our digital email and crowding up our physical mailbox as
00:30:15.559
well uh this is using the lob API um this was working at some point it's been
00:30:22.240
a uh couple months since I've tested it but um this takes a uh an image which is
00:30:27.440
an S3 bucket that we have set up uh and the message uh you have to do some very specific HTML for all the layout but um
00:30:35.840
by sending an email like this we would eventually get something
00:30:41.159
like this in our mailbox uh five to seven days extremely impractical but a lot of
00:30:52.840
fun speaking of Impractical and a lot of fun uh this is my favorite example by
00:31:04.919
far uh this is uh an abbreviated examp example for obvious
00:31:12.519
reasons but a few months ago I discovered the remote start and
00:31:17.600
monitoring device uh on my truck has some undocumented API in
00:31:23.519
points and I started wondering if I would be able to integrate these with emails some
00:31:29.120
somehow so for this example the truck mail box you would just send inbound email to truck at whatever uh and
00:31:37.000
actually have it make a request to the remote start API and fire up my
00:31:46.480
truck I think this is a great example of a problem that we don't need to
00:31:53.200
solve but we really want to and I think those those are some of
00:31:58.240
the the best problems that programmers deal with when you want something to work because you want this to exist
00:32:04.279
whether it's useful or not this was a lot of fun to get working
00:32:11.960
um I know that you know the the slide probably looks really nice and all that but uh it doesn't quite do it
00:32:20.919
justice let's see how it turned
00:32:26.399
out here we have my 2006 Toyota Tacoma outfitted with an aftermarket remote
00:32:32.279
start I'm going to send an inbound email to our truck mailbox and with the luck
00:32:37.960
be able to start the
00:32:43.320
truck uh you may have noticed there's no keys in the ignition here uh I'm going to try to send an invalent email to the
00:32:49.760
track mailbox uh we'll probably take a couple minutes for it to uh complete process but uh if everything goes well
00:32:56.399
uh we should be able to start the track truck here so let's see email sent now we
00:33:06.200
wait
00:33:15.760
sure my friends on with down email and why I
00:33:21.960
love action mailbox
00:33:29.279
um if you happen to be staying at the Boulderado and look across the street uh you may notice this machine um again
00:33:36.960
it's not hooked up don't send the email but it is one of the weirdest
00:33:44.000
things uh I've actually been able to get working uh by sending an inmal
00:33:50.880
email so you may have a complicated relationship with email but uh that doesn't mean your application has to
00:33:58.240
so in a handful of slides we've been able to cover everything from API responses document uploads postcard
00:34:05.240
reminders and and even starting a truck and these are all things that people can do without requiring registration uh or
00:34:11.520
even having to look at your application these are a few of the
00:34:16.639
reasons why I love action mailbox and hope you all begin to feel some of the love
00:34:22.720
too so these are a couple of ways to find me uh you can find me at my website and on Twitter uh if you would um like
00:34:31.119
to reach out I'd be more than happy to connect with any of you and since everyone is going to ask one more action
00:34:38.760
mailbox inbound email setup uh if you email slides at inbound. action mailbox.
00:34:45.200
proo uh you will receive a link for the slides um probably from 11 or so I'm a
00:34:52.919
incessant tinkerer with my slides so they may be a little bit outdated but this will email you back uh this speaker
00:34:57.960
deck where the slides are already uploaded uh so you can have access to those when whenever you get
00:35:03.560
home that's it thank
00:35:14.240
you the the question was how many emails did it take uh to actually get the the
00:35:20.800
the truck part working um I I lost track uh this was uh something that I I tried
00:35:28.000
to have for ready for uh rails comp um I think I left on Monday this was recorded
00:35:34.119
Friday at 4:30 p.m. so this was my last ditch effort um but uh
00:35:41.000
luckily uh the API had a couple of easier end points to kind of interact
00:35:46.680
with there was a lock and unlock one and then uh I think one that would return the battery level so I kind of played
00:35:53.440
with those first um without having to burn out the battery on my truck and
00:35:58.680
once I was able to get a couple of those working I would you know at least kind of assuming that I would be able to uh
00:36:04.599
and then uh to make sure that my truck doesn't get started whenever someone sends me a Spam inbound
00:36:11.160
email to to actually get everything working uh I ran everything through ingro on my local setup so as soon as it
00:36:17.960
was as soon as it was done recorded killed the ingro server uh and no one
00:36:23.119
has access to that URL ever again thankfully so that's one thing where I um really
00:36:31.480
try to lean on the mail provider they do a lot of like scanning and uh the dkim and SPF verification a lot of that
00:36:38.800
information is going to be in the headers of the emails so it lets you get as grle as like you feel like you you
00:36:45.200
may need to but we can also kind of lean on a few assumptions like when someone sends us
00:36:51.000
an inbound email we can probably assume that that's a valid email and send it back and if not it's kind of on them
00:36:57.640
they're they're the one that's spoofing everything so um for the security thing if you uh start to to get a little you
00:37:06.520
know hesitant about just randomly accept accepting stuff uh the before processing Hook is your best bet to uh start
00:37:13.560
refining everything uh check for a valid user account uh you can check that there is an attachment check that uh the
00:37:19.800
attachment is a PDF or CSV or whatever type um so in the life cycle hooks uh
00:37:25.640
this gives you a chance to uh verif everything is there and is at least secure enough uh before you begin the
00:37:33.240
processing uh the question was uh is there a way that we can uh receive the emails directly and um kind of
00:37:39.680
circumvent or skip the email service providers um so yes and no um we would
00:37:46.359
be able to do that um I think uh that's how a lot of the inbound email processing was done prior to action
00:37:52.359
mailbox um basically just uh web hook data uh that get sent to your application so
00:37:58.160
uh as long as you have some type of endpoint to feeli that request and some way to um parse the uh it's usually the
00:38:04.839
raw attachment data uh because it has to match the uh official email spec um then
00:38:10.119
you should be able to save it so with the string we can create a ruby mail object from there and then forward that
00:38:16.960
on to yourself or forward that to your support team uh and then that's the point where it it starts feeling more
00:38:22.720
like action mailer instead of mailbox so this gives us a a way to be able to
00:38:27.920
handle that easily all right one more question yes is there any like first class support
00:38:34.000
for calendar attachments um I don't believe so um I
00:38:42.000
know that there are um I've used a few of the the gems that are out there to send the attachments in the different uh
00:38:48.760
calendar formats in there um but your reply is basically like a normal email
00:38:54.359
so if you if you're able to generate the the IC uh attachment or one of the other ones you could include that in the email
00:39:01.359
but I've also found that uh most of the email clients are also smart enough uh if you put a date in there uh it'll
00:39:07.319
normally turn into like a little hover where you can automatically add that to your calendar so that's another way
00:39:12.560
where we can leverage what's already there in the email clients and not have to uh kind of build everything from
00:39:21.640
scratch thank you
00:39:27.560
I
