If it is an option for you, try downloading the entire mail and use tmail or 
rubymail to parse/split it. Maybe the problem is with your imap server.

http://www.lickey.com/rubymail/
http://i.loveruby.net/en/projects/tmail/

Martin

On Thursday 18 January 2007 20:52, Phil Cooperking wrote:
> I've been trying to find a good source of imap or pop information with
> ruby and cant. maybe I'm missing somthing.
>
> as I understand with imap you can select parts of the BODY like [TEXT]
> [1]. I understand what text does but I was underthe impression that [1]
> would select just the plain text. with that does'nt always seem to be
> the case with my test program. most of the results will come in plain
> text then some will contain a both multiparts. So does [1] actually
> do(mean).
>
> What I'm trying to do is strip everything from the mail apart from the
> Enevelope and the plain text. can somebody point me in the right
> direction? this is the line of code that I've been using to pull the
> email with
>
> mail.message = imap.fetch(message_id, 'BODY[1]')[0].attr['BODY[1]']
>
> thanks