Learning Rails 3

Chapter 19. Mail in Rails

Most of Rails is built around HTTP, but there will be times you also want to send or receive email messages. Rails 3 includes some major upgrades to the ActionMailer system, making it almost as easy to send and receive mail messages as it is to send and receive information over HTTP. Because mail systems are separate from Rails, there’s still some difficulty in connecting Rails to mail servers, but you can at least get started pretty easily.

Sending Mail Messages

Telling Rails to send email messages requires putting a little bit of infrastructure in place, creating views specifying what the messages should say, and telling Rails when to send what. Except that it’s an extra piece that goes outside the usual HTTP context, it’s not very difficult.

First, you need to generate a mailer:

$ rails generate mailer AwardMailer
      create  app/mailers/award_mailer.rb
      invoke  erb
      create  app/views/award_mailer
      invoke  test_unit
      create  test/functional/award_mailer_test.rb

That creates a new directory, app/mailers. Mailers aren’t really models, controllers, or views, so they get a separate place. Inside of that folder, award_mailer.rb offers a very basic start:

    class AwardMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default from: "[e-mail]"
    end

Setting defaults is useful, and the from field is probably the one most likely to be consistent. You can also set default to, subject, cc, and bcc fields if you want. For now, change [e-mail] to something more useful.

Next, we need to create ...