I’m trying to work with the ruby-gmail gem to extract specific parts of Gmail messages. What I need is a way to get the actual content and subject line from emails, not just raw message data.
When I look at the gem documentation, I can see there’s a .message method in the Gmail::Message class, but this just gives me raw email data that’s hard to parse. I need something cleaner.
The problem is that msg.read doesn’t seem to do anything useful, and msg.message returns unformatted email data instead of clean text content.
Is there a proper way to get the subject line and body text from Gmail messages using this gem? I’ve been searching but can’t find clear examples of how to extract readable content.
for subject line, try msg.subject and for the body, use msg.body. the ruby-gmail gem provides these methods which makes it super easy and clean, no need to deal with raw data!
Heads up - email encoding with this gem can be a pain. If you’re using msg.body and getting garbled text, it’s probably because the email has different character encodings. I fixed this by checking the content type first, then using msg.body.decoded for encoded content. Also, msg.message gives you a Mail object, so you can do stuff like msg.message.subject or msg.message.multipart? to check for multiple parts. The gem’s docs are pretty weak, but the Mail gem docs are way better for advanced parsing.
The msg.read method marks the email as read in Gmail - it doesn’t return content. You’re right that msg.message gives raw data, but the gem has cleaner methods. Beyond msg.subject and msg.body, you might need msg.text_part or msg.html_part for multipart emails. Some emails don’t have a direct body method response, especially HTML emails, so msg.html_part.body.decoded often works better. The gem can be finicky with authentication too - if you’re using two-factor auth, you’ll need an app-specific password instead of your regular Gmail password.