Parsing an Email Message for just the reply, not the old thread?

Rails
1

Hello, I set my app to receive incoming emails via a post from a
service. The controller that receives the posts looks a little like
this:

    class IncomingMailsController < ApplicationController
      require 'mail'
      skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token

      def create
        message = Mail.new(params[:message])
        message_plain = (params[:plain])
        Rails.logger.info   'message2.plain:'
        Rails.logger.info   message2

        render :text => 'success', :status => 200 # a status of

404 would reject the mail
end
end

That successfully is delivering the entire email message,
replies,forward history etc. The issue is I’d like to be able to
extract just the actual reply text.

Currently I get:

That's not a bad idea. Lets try that out.

On Nov 17, 2010, at 4:18 PM, XXXXX @ XXXXXXXX wrote:
> There's a new reply:

And I’d like to know how rails devs get just the reply:

That's not a bad idea. Lets try that out.

Ideas? Thanks

2

On Nov 17, 2010, at 5:40 PM, CuriousNewbie wrote:

     def create

And I’d like to know how rails devs get just the reply:

That’s not a bad idea. Lets try that out.

Ideas? Thanks

In real life it will be a bit more complicated since that delineator
isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s what you have there “on such and
such, so and so worte” and sometimes it’s “— Original Message” and
sometimes it’s something else. So you’ll need to check for all the
common ones and probably want the ability to see the entire message in
case it messes up or in cases like this message where I’ve replied
below that delineator.

But, for your case above assuming the plain text message is in a
variable str then…

str.sub(/\A.^\SOn \w+ \d+, \d+ at. wrote:.*/m, ‘’)

or something close to that ought to do it.