Maildir

A ruby library for reading and writing messages in the maildir format.

What’s so great about the maildir format

See cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

“Two words: no locks.” – Daniel J. Berstein

The maildir format allows multiple processes to read and write arbitrary messages without file locks.

New messages are initially written to a “tmp” directory with an automatically-generated unique filename. After the message is written, it’s moved to the “new” directory where other processes may read it.

While the maildir format was created for email, it works well for arbitrary data. This library can read & write email messages or arbitrary data. See Pluggable serializers for more.

Install

sudo gem install maildir

Usage

Create a maildir in /home/aaron/mail

maildir = Maildir.new("/home/aaron/mail") # creates tmp, new, and cur dirs
# call Maildir.new("/home/aaron/mail", false) to skip directory creation.

Add a new message. This creates a new file with the contents “Hello World!”; returns the path fragment to the file. Messages are written to the tmp dir then moved to new.

message = maildir.add("Hello World!")

List new messages

maildir.list(:new) # => [message]

Move the message from “new” to “cur” to indicate that some process has retrieved the message.

message.process

Indeed, the message is in cur, not new.

maildir.list(:new) # => []
maildir.list(:cur) # => [message]

Add some flags to the message to indicate state. See “What can I put in info” at cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html for flag conventions.

message.add_flag("S") # Mark the message as "seen"
message.add_flag("F") # Mark the message as "flagged"
message.remove_flag("F") # unflag the message
message.add_flag("T") # Mark the message as "trashed"

Get a key to uniquely identify the message

key = message.key

Load the contents of the message

data = message.data

Find the message based using the key

message_copy = maildir.get(key)
message == message_copy # => true

Delete the message from disk

message.destroy # => returns the frozen message
maildir.list(:cur) # => []

Pluggable serializers

By default, message data are written and read from disk as a string. It’s often desirable to process the string into a useful object. Maildir supports configurable serializers to convert message data into a useful object.

The following serializers are included:

Maildir::Serializer::Base (the default)
Maildir::Serializer::Mail
Maildir::Serializer::Marshal
Maildir::Serializer::JSON
Maildir::Serializer::YAML

Maildir::Serializer::Base simply reads and writes strings to disk.

Maildir::Message.serializer # => Maildir::Serializer::Base.new (by default)
message = maildir.add("Hello World!") # writes "Hello World!" to disk
message.data # => "Hello World!"

The Mail serializer takes a ruby Mail object (github.com/mikel/mail) and writes RFC2822 email messages.

require 'maildir/serializer/mail'
Maildir::Message.serializer = Maildir::Serializer::Mail.new
mail = Mail.new(...)
message = maildir.add(mail) # writes an RFC2822 message to disk
message.data == mail # => true; data is parsed as a Mail object

The Marshal, JSON, and YAML serializers work similarly. E.g.:

require 'maildir/serializer/json'
Maildir::Message.serializer = Maildir::Serializer::JSON.new
my_data = {"foo" => nil, "my_array" => [1,2,3]}
message = maildir.add(my_data) # writes {"foo":null,"my_array":[1,2,3]}
message.data == my_data # => true

It’s trivial to create a custom serializer. Implement the following two methods:

load(path)
dump(data, path)

Contributors