{"id":6607,"date":"2019-05-13T09:27:06","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T09:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.botreetechnologies.com\/blog\/?p=6607"},"modified":"2020-12-07T12:45:40","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T07:15:40","slug":"action-mailbox-unboxing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.botreetechnologies.com\/blog\/action-mailbox-unboxing\/","title":{"rendered":"Action Mailbox – Unboxing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are many new shiny features are going to be unveiled in Rails 6. New methods for ActiveRecord, ActionText, Action Mailbox are some of them. We are going to talk about Action Mailbox today. What it is? How to use it? How it helped us to solve one real-time problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Action Mailbox routes incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes for processing in Rails. It supports all major platforms or ingresses like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. You can also handle inbound emails directly via the built-in Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Installation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned before, Action Mailbox is going to be shipped with Rails 6 which is not released officially yet when I am writing this blog. You need to install the --pre<\/code> version of rails to use this feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rails 6 needs Ruby version 2.5 or higher. But I met with class loading issue and after searching around found that there is an issue with version 2.5 and Action Mailbox. So use ruby 2.6 or higher version. Here is the issue link<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Install rails 6 using below command. Make sure you are using ruby-2.6 or higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

gem install rails --pre<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would strongly recommend creating gemsets for it. And create two files .ruby-version<\/code> and .ruby-gemset<\/code> in the root directory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After installing the rails, create new rails project using below command. This will install all dependencies and take postgres as database<\/p>\n\n\n\n

rails new action_mailbox -d postgresql<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now run bellow generator to create mailbox related migration and files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

rails action_mailbox:install<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will create migrations related to active storage and action mailbox tables. Run rails db:migrate<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Run rails webpacker:install<\/code> to install asset files otherwise, it will throw an error while running rails server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Start rails server using rails server<\/code> command and check localhost:3000<\/code> to check if everything is working fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You would need to configure your email service provider to post JSON data to your rails webhook when someone sends email to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find all the details on the official doc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/edgeguides.rubyonrails.org\/action_mailbox_basics.html#configuration\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Use Case\/Problem<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of our clients comes with a problem that, users send him lots of emails asking the price of the specific product and he would need to reply manually after checking the price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technically we would need to perform below actions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Read inbox with a subject contains SKU<\/li>
  2. Read SKU from the body and identify SKU<\/li>
  3. Call an external API to get product details<\/li>
  4. Send a predefined email with product details to the sender<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Read Also: Rails 6: Action Mailbox\u200a\u2014\u200aExplained. Why?How? When?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    Implementation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    You might have already got the idea of how Action Mailbox will help us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    When you have ran rails action_mailbox:install<\/code> it would have created ApplicationMailbox.rb<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In this file, you can define controller-like routes and based on that assign relevant mailbox. There is a specific syntax to define that routes which we will see later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In our case, if the subject or message body has the word SKU then we would need to process the email using PriceFinderMailbox<\/code> and perform other actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here are some rules for defining the routes based on the original doc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n