Recently, I came across this gem called terminal-notifier, it allows you to send Mac OS X User Notifications. It also comes with a command-line tool. I was thinking of some interesting use-case for it. Then an idea struck, how about an application that notifies when I receive a mail contains specific text, or from some specific user.
Now I'll give a little background about how and why this app. In our office on any special occasion, people get chocolates or sweets and put it in cafeteria, and then mail in a common group to let people know. As it happens, I don't have the habit to check my mails very frequently, and often miss out on important mails at right time. So how about an script that checks for mails containing certain words or from a specific user.
So the task was simple check for the new emails and if they contain a match for the given criteria in my case it was if the mail subject or the body contains words sweets or chocolates then send a User Notification. To get the emails I used the gmail gem. Now this gem needs your username and password. But storing them as plaintext in the script is not smart from security point. So I was looking for a simple and reliable option to store and retrieve my username and password. So I used OSX keychain tool to store the sensitive information. To retrieve the email and password I used the commandline tool "security". Initially to store the username and password in OSX Keychain use,
security add-internet-password -a username -w password -s http://mail.google.com
And then to retrieve it use,
security 2>&1 find-internet-password -ga username | grep password | cut -d '"' -f2
Moving forward once I get the username and password, I logged into the gmail account by,
gmail = Gmail.new(username, password)
After logging in I searched through the unread mails for the search queries in both subject and body of mail. Once I find the mail containing the search term I fire a notification. Now as this gem didn't have a sound notification I used the system sounds file and played it using the afplay command as,
afplay -v 4 -q 1 /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff
and then fire the user notification by calling,
TerminalNotifier.notify("Subject : #{content_to_display}", :title => 'Title')
and then marked the mail as read so that it didn't come up when next time the cron runs. Finally to continuously scan through my inbox I set up this script as a cron that will run every minute,
*/1 * * * * ruby gmail_notifier.rb
You can find the complete script on github here
Now I'll give a little background about how and why this app. In our office on any special occasion, people get chocolates or sweets and put it in cafeteria, and then mail in a common group to let people know. As it happens, I don't have the habit to check my mails very frequently, and often miss out on important mails at right time. So how about an script that checks for mails containing certain words or from a specific user.
So the task was simple check for the new emails and if they contain a match for the given criteria in my case it was if the mail subject or the body contains words sweets or chocolates then send a User Notification. To get the emails I used the gmail gem. Now this gem needs your username and password. But storing them as plaintext in the script is not smart from security point. So I was looking for a simple and reliable option to store and retrieve my username and password. So I used OSX keychain tool to store the sensitive information. To retrieve the email and password I used the commandline tool "security". Initially to store the username and password in OSX Keychain use,
security add-internet-password -a username -w password -s http://mail.google.com
And then to retrieve it use,
security 2>&1 find-internet-password -ga username | grep password | cut -d '"' -f2
Moving forward once I get the username and password, I logged into the gmail account by,
gmail = Gmail.new(username, password)
After logging in I searched through the unread mails for the search queries in both subject and body of mail. Once I find the mail containing the search term I fire a notification. Now as this gem didn't have a sound notification I used the system sounds file and played it using the afplay command as,
afplay -v 4 -q 1 /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff
and then fire the user notification by calling,
TerminalNotifier.notify("Subject : #{content_to_display}", :title => 'Title')
and then marked the mail as read so that it didn't come up when next time the cron runs. Finally to continuously scan through my inbox I set up this script as a cron that will run every minute,
*/1 * * * * ruby gmail_notifier.rb
You can find the complete script on github here
