Question

I am new to Ruby, I’m trying to return the number of emails between 9am and 11am.

For example.

@received_today = imap.search(["SINCE", @today.strftime("%d-%b-%Y-%H"):"BEFORE", @today.strftime("%d-%b-%Y-%H")]).count.to_s

I know this is wrong, but it’s my closest guess on how to do this. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Maybe something like this:

require 'date'
start_time = Net::IMAP.format_datetime(DateTime.strptime("09:00", "%H:%M"))
end_time = Net::IMAP.format_datetime(DateTime.strptime("11:00", "%H:%M"))
@received_today = imap.search(["SINCE", start_time, "BEFORE", end_time ]).count

UPDATE:
Try #2 🙂

Since imap SEARCH command ignores the time part in SINCE and BEFORE conditions this should work:

require 'date'

today = Net::IMAP.format_date(Date.today)

start_time = DateTime.strptime("09:00", "%H:%M")
end_time = DateTime.strptime("11:00", "%H:%M")

@received_today = imap.search(["ON", today]) # get sequence nums of todays emails

# fetch the INTERNALDATE-s and count the ones in the timeframe
count = imap.fetch(@received_today, "INTERNALDATE").count{ |data|
  time = DateTime.parse(data.attr["INTERNALDATE"])
  time.between? start_time, end_time
}