Ruby: send emails: emailserver, sender, reciever, subject, body from textfile - ruby

Question

this is my first time trying to do some tasks in ruby. my cats name is ruby so i decided to use ruby language on my linux box to accomplish my needs.
the first thing i want to do is sending emails with ruby.
It's not so complicated and until now i have this code
require 'net/smtp'
message = <<MESSAGE_END
From: wakeupruby <wakeupruby#fromdomain.com>
To: Wakeup-Email<wakeuprasperry#todomain.com>
Subject: Wakeup-Email
It's 8 in the morning, get up, please.
MESSAGE_END
Net::SMTP.start('mail.mydomain.com', 25) do |smtp|
smtp.send_message message,
'test#mydomain.com',
'test#mydomain.com'
end
It works like expected.
After that, i created a textfile which looks like this:
emaildata.txt
MAILSERVER,DOMAIN,SENDER,RECIPIENT,SUBJECT,BODY
mailserver1.lab,lab,user1.lab,user2.lab,testemail,dont read this!.
so, here is whats failing
i would like to read the textfile named emaildata.txt and use this data (except the first line which describes the values) row by row and uses this entrys to fill up the variables. one row=one email.
i'm completly stucked how to do that.
any help getting it running would be fine.
the first thing should be naming all variables like the naming in the csv-file.
MAILSERVER,DOMAIN,SENDER,RECIPIENT,SUBJECT,BODY
to read from the csv file i used this:
require 'csv'
CSV.foreach('emaildata.txt',col_sep:',', row_sep: :auto, headers: true) do |row|
puts row.inspect
end
this gives me this list from my emaildata.txt file
<CSV::Row "MAILSERVER":"mailserver1.lab" "DOMAIN":"lab" "SENDER":"user1.lab" "RECIPIENT":"user2.lab" "SUBJECT":"testemail" "BODY":"dont read this!. ">
<CSV::Row>
there can be more columns, so doing it static would not help when we have more columns later.
how can i use the Head colmn values as variables? For example MAILSERVER and print them to the screen?
i tried
put $MAILSERVER
put #MAILSERVER
no success at all.
then, filling the variables for the first time with the values from the second row
sending the email
clearing the variables
checking, if this is the last entry , if no
filling the variables from the third row
sending the email
clearing the variables
checking if this is the last entry, if no, again, if no quit.
i did that manually with telnet like this:
telnet $mailserver 25
helo $domain
mail from:<$SENDER>
rcpt to:<$RECIPIENT>
data
Subject: $SUBJECT
<emptyline>
$BODY
.
quit
which works. but instead of doing it manually i would like to get it running with... ruby.
thank you for reading and helping
Joe

Answer 1

If I understand the question correctly you are trying to use a CSV file to form an email? I would avoid using the csv module for this. You can do every thing with basic ruby functionality.
first you open the file and store each line into an array
csv_array = []
csv_file = File.open("/path/to/file.csv", "r")
csv_file.each_line {|row| csv_array.push(row)}
Each row will contain a newline caracter so we will strip that.
csv_array.each {|row| row.strip!}
One final step to format everything correctly. We need to remove the first row that contains our column headers.
csv_array.shift
Now each row of our csv file is an element in our array. You can loop through the elements splitting each line at the comma and use the new array's elements as our variables.
csv_array.each do |line|
row = line.split(",")
telnet row[0] 25
helo row[2]
rcpt to::row[3]
data
Subject: row[4]
<emptyline>
row[5]
end
Telnet is not the best way to send an email though. I would use mailfactory. much easier and flexible than net/smtp.

Answer 2

thank you all for your contributions to solve this. It finally worked with the great help of #letitworknow.
Here is the complete code, done with mailfactory:
require 'rubygems'
require 'net/smtp'
require 'mailfactory'
#read csv file
csv_array = []
csv_file = File.open("/root/mailtest/emaildata.txt", "r")
csv_file.each_line {|row| csv_array.push(row)}
csv_array.each {|row| row.strip!}
csv_array.shift
csv_array.each do |line|
row = line.split(";")
#Connect to SMTP Server
smtp = Net::SMTP.new(row[0], 25)
smtp.start(row[1])
#Construct Mail Message
mail = MailFactory.new()
mail.from = row[2]
mail.to = row[3]
mail.subject = row[4]
mail.txt = row[5]
#Construct SMTP Message
smtp.send_message mail.construct, row[2], row[3]
#Send this (and all other) message
smtp.finish()
#close the each.loop
end
the first version fails with the issue described before, so its not completly finished at this point. until now i did not manage to get it running.
Best
John