Checking Gmail POP+SSL with Ruby 1.8.6 in 10 minutes or less.
I needed to check Gmail via POP + SSL and didn’t want to use Ruby 1.9, what did I do?
Step 1: Install the latest version of stunnel
Step 2: Put the contents of the stunnel config file you see below some place convenient like ~/gmail-pop-stunnel.conf
foreground = yes
client = yes
pid =
[gmail]
delay = yes
accept = localhost:10000
connect = pop.gmail.com:995
Step 3: Start up stunnel
$ stunnel ~/gmail-pop-stunnel.conf &
Step 4: Fire up a Ruby program to pull down the messages.
require ‘net/pop’
conn = Net::POP3.new(’localhost:10000′)
conn.start(’youraddress@gmail.com’, ‘yourpassword’)
conn.mails.each { |msg| puts msg.pop }
msg.delete # your choice to delete or not
end
The source for this script shamelessly stolen from The Ruby Cookbook
And you should be aware that this is technically a violation of google’s terms of service, but if you aren’t doing anything other than what you could do through Outlook Express you probably aren’t causing trouble.