How to read Email Body in NiFi

Question

HelloHow to read the body of the mail in nifi? I don't see any relevant processor for this.I see there is an "ExtractEmailAttachments" processor but will it read body reliably? We tried to test and see that it is able to make two flowfiles after executing. One is with a text/plain and has the email body present and another one is text/html having some html content having what we sent in mail as well.But due to its name being "ExtractEmailAttachment" and not something like ExtractEmailBody I am not sure.How to effectively and reliably read the mail body? In NiFi 1.28 we had Python (which was able to read the body of mail) but in NiFi 2.8 we don't have Python and able to see GroovyScript which is not allowing import of javax.mail type libraries which is required for writing the logic to fetch the email body.

vafs · Accepted Answer

Hello @AlokKumar,

The basic flow of this would be something like this:

1. Connect your incoming email using ConsumeIMAP, ConsumePOP3, or ListenSMTP, which ever works better for you.
2. Route that to the ExtractEmailAttachments. This processor unpacks the MIME structures into individual FlowFiles, for example text/plain, text/html, application/pdf
3. Using RouteOnAttribute separate the body parts:
- body_text: ${mime.type:equals('text/plain')}
- body_html: ${mime.type:equals('text/html')}
4. With ExtractText get the email body and capture the information you need.

About the javax.mail, you're correct, that is not supported, you should use jakarta.mail types.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NIFI-12820

vafs · Answer

Hello @AlokKumar,

Thanks for being part of our community.

That what you need should be possible with the ExtractEmailAttachments.
This processor extracts the parts based on a MIME format:

Writes Attributes

Name Description

filename	The filename of the attachment
email.attachment.parent.filename	The filename of the parent FlowFile
email.attachment.parent.uuid	The UUID of the original FlowFile.
mime.type	The mime type of the attachment.

https://nifi.apache.org/components/org.apache.nifi.processors.email.ExtractEmailAttachments/

Under those MIME types, you should be able to get the text/plain or text/html with the body content of the email, as you need.

Sign up

Please use your Cloudera account.

Login to the community

Please use your Cloudera account.