Ruby

Compute a Global Unique Key for an Email

Demonstrates the Chilkat Email.ComputeGlobalKey2 method, which computes a global unique key for the email — an MD5 digest formed from the message-id concatenated with other identifying fields. The first argument is the encoding of the returned key (such as hex or base64), and the second folds the key when true. This example loads an email and computes its key as hex.

Background: A "global key" is a compact fingerprint that identifies a specific message across systems. Because it is derived deterministically from the message's own headers, the same email yields the same key anywhere it is computed — ideal for de-duplicating messages, using as a database primary key, or detecting whether a message has already been processed.

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Ruby

require 'chilkat'

success = false

#  Demonstrates the ComputeGlobalKey2 method, which computes a global unique key for the
#  email (an MD5 digest of the message-id and other fields).  The first argument is the encoding of the
#  returned key (such as "hex" or "base64"), and the second folds the key when true.

email = Chilkat::CkEmail.new()

success = email.LoadEml("qa_data/eml/message.eml")
if (success == false)
    print email.lastErrorText() + "\n";
    exit
end

#  Compute the global key as a lowercase hex string.
key = email.computeGlobalKey2("hex",false)
print "Global key: " + key + "\n";

#  Note: The path "qa_data/..." is a relative local filesystem path,
#  relative to the current working directory of the running application.