Some way to sort and paginate mails read from a POP3 mail server

rubyonrails-talk
1

Problem:

I have written a program to fetch mails from a POP3 mail server. I do not parse all the mails at once, but i process a predefined number based on page_size ( i could not find a simpler way of pagination), as follows

  def parseMail(page,pageSize)       emails=Array.new       #todo: open the connection only once, and iterate over the mails, problem: connection to mail server closed       Net::POP3::start(MAIL_SERVER,nil,USER,PASS) do |pop|           if !pop.mails.empty?               mails=pop.mails               start=(page-1)*pageSize               last=start+pageSize               if (mails.length<last)                   last=mails.length               end

              mails[start..(last-1)].each do|mail|               begin                   email=TMail::Mail.parse(mail.pop)                   emails.push(email)                   rescue Exception => e                       puts "Error receiving email at " + Time.now.to_s + "::: " + e.message                       raise e.message                   end               end # end of the block           end       end

     return emails   end

As you can see, i populate an array emails with the mails parsed. But i want to sort the mails according to the date at which the mail was sent. I want to parse the mails in the descending order of the mail's sent date. But pop.mails is an array of strings and i am not sure how easily <=> operator can be implemented to order the mails this way.

Summary of the problem: A way to sort the mails read from a POP3 server, while not parsing all the mails.