Removing email addresses from imported posts

Product Support
2

Here is a quick script @pfaffman wrote for us. Any crappy parts are things I changed. It has a few bells and whistles you may not need, for example a cutoff date so it only removes email addresses from posts before that date.

I found it best to replace addresses with ‘email@removed.com’, rather than remove them entirely. Can’t remember why- I think it played nicer with surrounding brackets.

def remove_email_addresses
  n=0 
  test_mode=false 
  dt=DateTime.new(2019, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0) 
  no_emails="email@removed." 
  Post.where("raw like '%@%'").find_each do |post| 
    sleep 0.1 
    if post.created_at < dt 
      post.raw.gsub!(/[a-z0-9+-_.]+@[a-z0-9+-]+[. ,;\\]/i,no_emails) 
      if test_mode 
        puts post.raw 
        sleep 10 
      end 
      post.save unless test_mode 
      post.rebake! unless test_mode 
      puts "saved" 
      n+=1 
      puts n.to_s 
    else 
      puts "new post, leaving as-is" 
    end 
  end 
  nil 
end

> remove_email_addresses