Ruby on Rails Guides: Action Mailer Basics

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## Action Mailer Basics

This guide should provide you with all you need to get started in sending and receiving emails from and to your application, and many internals of Action Mailer. It also covers how to test your mailers.

### Chapters

1. Introduction
2. Sending Emails
   - Walkthrough to Generating a Mailer
   - Auto encoding header values
   - Complete List of Action Mailer Methods
   - Mailer Views
   - Action Mailer Layouts
   - Generating URLs in Action Mailer Views
   - Sending Multipart Emails
   - Sending Emails with Attachments
3. Receiving Emails
4. Using Action Mailer Helpers
5. Action Mailer Configuration
   - Example Action Mailer Configuration
   - Action Mailer Configuration for GMail
6. Mailer Testing

This Guide is based on Rails 3.0. Some of the code shown here will not work in earlier versions of Rails.

### 1 Introduction

Action Mailer allows you to send emails from your application using a mailer model and views. So, in Rails, emails are used by creating mailers that inherit from `ActionMailer::Base` and live in `app/mailers`. Those mailers have associated views that appear alongside controller views in `app/views`.

### 2 Sending Emails

This section will provide a step-by-step guide to creating a mailer and its views.

#### 2.1 Walkthrough to Generating a Mailer

##### 2.1.1 Create the Mailer

    $ rails generate mailer UserMailer
    create  app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
    invoke  erb
    create    app/views/user_mailer
    invoke  test_unit
    create    test/functional/user_mailer_test.rb

So we got the mailer, the views, and the tests.

##### 2.1.2 Edit the Mailer

`app/mailers/user_mailer.rb` contains an empty mailer:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default :from => "from@example.com"
    end

Let’s add a method called `welcome_email`, that will send an email to the user’s registered email address:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default :from => "notifications@example.com"

      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = "http://example.com/login"
        mail(:to => user.email, :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site")
      end
    end

Here is a quick explanation of the items presented in the preceding method. For a full list of all available options, please have a look further down at the Complete List of Action Mailer user-settable attributes section.

- `default Hash` – This is a hash of default values for any email you send, in this case we are setting the `:from` header to a value for all messages in this class, this can be overridden on a per email basis
- `mail` – The actual email message, we are passing the `:to` and `:subject` headers in.

Just like controllers, any instance variables we define in the method become available for use in the views.

##### 2.1.3 Create a Mailer View

Create a file called `welcome_email.html.erb` in `app/views/user_mailer/`. This will be the template used for the email, formatted in HTML:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
      </head>
      <body>
        <h1>Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.name %></h1>
        <p>
          You have successfully signed up to example.com,
          your username is: <%= @user.login %>.<br/>
        </p>
        <p>
          To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.
        </p>
        <p>Thanks for joining and have a great day!</p>
      </body>
    </html>

It is also a good idea to make a text part for this email, to do this, create a file called `welcome_email.text.erb` in `app/views/user_mailer/`:

    Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.name %>
    ===============================================

    You have successfully signed up to example.com,
    your username is: <%= @user.login %>.

    To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.

    Thanks for joining and have a great day!

When you call the `mail` method now, Action Mailer will detect the two templates (text and HTML) and automatically generate a `multipart/alternative` email.

##### 2.1.4 Wire It Up So That the System Sends the Email When a User Signs Up

There are several ways to do this, some people create Rails Observers to fire off emails, others do it inside of the User Model. However, in Rails 3, mailers are really just another way to render a view. Instead of rendering a view and sending out the HTTP protocol, they are just sending it out through the Email protocols instead. Due to this, it makes sense to just have your controller tell the mailer to send an email when a user is successfully created.

Setting this up is painfully simple.

First off, we need to create a simple `User` scaffold:

    $ rails generate scaffold user name:string email:string login:string
    $ rake db:migrate

Now that we have a user model to play with, we will just edit the `app/controllers/users_controller.rb` make it instruct the UserMailer to deliver an email to the newly created user by editing the create action and inserting a call to `UserMailer.welcome_email` right after the user is successfully saved:

    class UsersController < ApplicationController
      # POST /users
      # POST /users.json
      def create
        @user = User.new(params[:user])

        respond_to do |format|
          if @user.save
            # Tell the UserMailer to send a welcome Email after save
            UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver

            format.html { redirect_to(@user, :notice => 'User was successfully created.') }
            format.json { render :json => @user, :status => :created, :location => @user }
          else
            format.html { render :action => "new" }
            format.json { render :json => @user.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
          end
        end
      end
    end

This provides a much simpler implementation that does not require the registering of observers and the like.

The method `welcome_email` returns a `Mail::Message` object which can then just be told `deliver` to send itself out.

In previous versions of Rails, you would call `deliver_welcome_email` or `create_welcome_email`. This has been deprecated in Rails 3.0 in favour of just calling the method name itself.

Sending out an email should only take a fraction of a second, but if you are planning on sending out many emails, or you have a slow domain resolution service, you might want to investigate using a background process like Delayed Job.

#### 2.2 Auto encoding header values

Action Mailer now handles the auto encoding of multibyte characters inside of headers and bodies.

If you are using UTF-8 as your character set, you do not have to do anything special, just go ahead and send in UTF-8 data to the address fields, subject, keywords, filenames or body of the email and Action Mailer will auto encode it into quoted printable for you in the case of a header field or Base64 encode any body parts that are non US-ASCII.

For more complex examples such as defining alternate character sets or self encoding text first, please refer to the Mail library.

#### 2.3 Complete List of Action Mailer Methods

There are just three methods that you need to send pretty much any email message:

- `headers` – Specifies any header on the email you want, you can pass a hash of header field names and value pairs, or you can call `headers[:field_name] = ‘value’`
- `attachments` – Allows you to add attachments to your email, for example `attachments[‘file-name.jpg’] = File.read(‘file-name.jpg’)`
- `mail` – Sends the actual email itself. You can pass in headers as a hash to the mail method as a parameter, mail will then create an email, either plain text, or multipart, depending on what email templates you have defined.

##### 2.3.1 Custom Headers

Defining custom headers are simple, you can do it one of three ways:

- Defining a header field as a parameter to the `mail` method:

    mail("X-Spam" => value)

- Passing in a key value assignment to the `headers` method:

    headers["X-Spam"] = value

- Passing a hash of key value pairs to the `headers` method:

    headers {"X-Spam" => value, "X-Special" => another_value}

All `X-Value` headers per the RFC2822 can appear more than one time. If you want to delete an `X-Value` header, you need to assign it a value of `nil`.

##### 2.3.2 Adding Attachments

Adding attachments has been simplified in Action Mailer 3.0.

- Pass the file name and content and Action Mailer and the Mail gem will automatically guess the mime_type, set the encoding and create the attachment.

    attachments['filename.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/filename.jpg')

Mail will automatically Base64 encode an attachment, if you want something different, pre-encode your content and pass in the encoded content and encoding in a `Hash` to the `attachments` method.

- Pass the file name and specify headers and content and Action Mailer and Mail will use the settings you pass in.

    encoded_content = SpecialEncode(File.read('/path/to/filename.jpg'))
    attachments['filename.jpg'] = {:mime_type => 'application/x-gzip',
                                   :encoding => 'SpecialEncoding',
                                   :content => encoded_content }

If you specify an encoding, Mail will assume that your content is already encoded and not try to Base64 encode it.

##### 2.3.3 Making Inline Attachments

Action Mailer 3.0 makes inline attachments, which involved a lot of hacking in pre 3.0 versions, much simpler and trivial as they should be.

- Firstly, to tell Mail to turn an attachment into an inline attachment, you just call `#inline` on the attachments method within your Mailer:

    def welcome
      attachments.inline['image.jpg'] = File.read('/path/to/image.jpg')
    end

- Then in your view, you can just reference `attachments[]` as a hash and specify which attachment you want to show, calling `url` on it and then passing the result into the `image_tag` method:

    <p>Hello there, this is our image</p>

    <%= image_tag attachments['image.jpg'].url %>

- As this is a standard call to `image_tag` you can pass in an options hash after the attachment url as you could for any other image:

    <p>Hello there, this is our image</p>

    <%= image_tag attachments['image.jpg'].url, :alt => 'My Photo',
                                                :class => 'photos' %>

##### 2.3.4 Sending Email To Multiple Recipients

It is possible to send email to one or more recipients in one email (for e.g. informing all admins of a new signup) by setting the list of emails to the `:to` key. The list of emails can be an array of email addresses or a single string with the addresses separated by commas.

    class AdminMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default :to => Admin.all.map(&:email),
              :from => "notification@example.com"

      def new_registration(user)
        @user = user
        mail(:subject => "New User Signup: #{@user.email}")
      end
    end

The same format can be used to set carbon copy (Cc:) and blind carbon copy (Bcc:) recipients, by using the `:cc` and `:bcc` keys respectively.

##### 2.3.5 Sending Email With Name

Sometimes you wish to show the name of the person instead of just their email address when they receive the email. The trick to doing that is to format the email address in the format `“Name <email>”`.

    def welcome_email(user)
      @user = user
      email_with_name = "#{@user.name} <#{@user.email}>"
      mail(:to => email_with_name, :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site")
    end

#### 2.4 Mailer Views

Mailer views are located in the `app/views/name_of_mailer_class` directory. The specific mailer view is known to the class because its name is the same as the mailer method. In our example from above, our mailer view for the `welcome_email` method will be in `app/views/user_mailer/welcome_email.html.erb` for the HTML version and `welcome_email.text.erb` for the plain text version.

To change the default mailer view for your action you do something like:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default :from => "notifications@example.com"

      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = "http://example.com/login"
        mail(:to => user.email,
             :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site",
             :template_path => 'notifications',
             :template_name => 'another')
      end
    end

In this case it will look for templates at `app/views/notifications` with name `another`.

If you want more flexibility you can also pass a block and render specific templates or even render inline or text without using a template file:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default :from => "notifications@example.com"

      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = "http://example.com/login"
        mail(:to => user.email,
             :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site") do |format|
          format.html { render 'another_template' }
          format.text { render :text => 'Render text' }
        end
      end

    end

This will render the template ‘another_template.html.erb’ for the HTML part and use the rendered text for the text part. The render command is the same one used inside of Action Controller, so you can use all the same options, such as `:text`, `:inline` etc.

#### 2.5 Action Mailer Layouts

Just like controller views, you can also have mailer layouts. The layout name needs to be the same as your mailer, such as `user_mailer.html.erb` and `user_mailer.text.erb` to be automatically recognized by your mailer as a layout.

In order to use a different file just use:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      layout 'awesome' # use awesome.(html|text).erb as the layout
    end

Just like with controller views, use `yield` to render the view inside the layout.

You can also pass in a `:layout => ‘layout_name’` option to the render call inside the format block to specify different layouts for different actions:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      def welcome_email(user)
        mail(:to => user.email) do |format|
          format.html { render :layout => 'my_layout' }
          format.text
        end
      end
    end

Will render the HTML part using the `my_layout.html.erb` file and the text part with the usual `user_mailer.text.erb` file if it exists.

#### 2.6 Generating URLs in Action Mailer Views

URLs can be generated in mailer views using `url_for` or named routes.

Unlike controllers, the mailer instance doesn’t have any context about the incoming request so you’ll need to provide the `:host`, `:controller`, and `:action`:

    <%= url_for(:host => "example.com",
                :controller => "welcome",
                :action => "greeting") %>

When using named routes you only need to supply the `:host`:

    <%= user_url(@user, :host => "example.com") %>

Email clients have no web context and so paths have no base URL to form complete web addresses. Thus, when using named routes only the “_url” variant makes sense.

It is also possible to set a default host that will be used in all mailers by setting the `:host` option in the `ActionMailer::Base.default_url_options` hash as follows:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      default_url_options[:host] = "example.com"

      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = user_url(@user)
        mail(:to => user.email,
             :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site")
      end
    end

#### 2.7 Sending Multipart Emails

Action Mailer will automatically send multipart emails if you have different templates for the same action. So, for our UserMailer example, if you have `welcome_email.text.erb` and `welcome_email.html.erb` in `app/views/user_mailer`, Action Mailer will automatically send a multipart email with the HTML and text versions setup as different parts.

The order of the parts getting inserted is determined by the `:parts_order` inside of the `ActionMailer::Base.default` method. If you want to explicitly alter the order, you can either change the `:parts_order` or explicitly render the parts in a different order:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = user_url(@user)
        mail(:to => user.email,
             :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site") do |format|
          format.html
          format.text
        end
      end
    end

Will put the HTML part first, and the plain text part second.

#### 2.8 Sending Emails with Attachments

Attachments can be added by using the `attachments` method:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      def welcome_email(user)
        @user = user
        @url  = user_url(@user)
        attachments['terms.pdf'] = File.read('/path/terms.pdf')
        mail(:to => user.email,
             :subject => "Please see the Terms and Conditions attached")
      end
    end

The above will send a multipart email with an attachment, properly nested with the top level being `multipart/mixed` and the first part being a `multipart/alternative` containing the plain text and HTML email messages.

### 3 Receiving Emails

Receiving and parsing emails with Action Mailer can be a rather complex endeavor. Before your email reaches your Rails app, you would have had to configure your system to somehow forward emails to your app, which needs to be listening for that. So, to receive emails in your Rails app you’ll need to:

- Implement a `receive` method in your mailer.

- Configure your email server to forward emails from the address(es) you would like your app to receive to `/path/to/app/script/rails runner 'UserMailer.receive(STDIN.read)'`.

Once a method called `receive` is defined in any mailer, Action Mailer will parse the raw incoming email into an email object, decode it, instantiate a new mailer, and pass the email object to the mailer `receive` instance method. Here’s an example:

    class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
      def receive(email)
        page = Page.find_by_address(email.to.first)
        page.emails.create(
          :subject => email.subject,
          :body => email.body
        )

        if email.has_attachments?
          email.attachments.each do |attachment|
            page.attachments.create({
              :file => attachment,
              :description => email.subject
            })
          end
        end
      end
    end

### 4 Using Action Mailer Helpers

Action Mailer now just inherits from Abstract Controller, so you have access to the same generic helpers as you do in Action Controller.

### 5 Action Mailer Configuration

The following configuration options are best made in one of the environment files (environment.rb, production.rb, etc…)

`template_root` | Determines the base from which template references will be made.
`logger` | Generates information on the mailing run if available. Can be set to `nil` for no logging. Compatible with both Ruby’s own `Logger` and `Log4r` loggers.
`smtp_settings` | Allows detailed configuration for `:smtp` delivery method: `:address` – Allows you to use a remote mail server. Just change it from its default “localhost” setting. `:port` – On the off chance that your mail server doesn’t run on port 25, you can change it. `:domain` – If you need to specify a HELO domain, you can do it here. `:user_name` – If your mail server requires authentication, set the username in this setting. `:password` – If your mail server requires authentication, set the password in this setting. `:authentication` – If your mail server requires authentication, you need to specify the authentication type here. This is a symbol and one of `:plain`, `:login`, `:cram_md5`.
`sendmail_settings` | Allows you to override options for the `:sendmail` delivery method. `:location` – The location of the sendmail executable. Defaults to `/usr/sbin/sendmail`. `:arguments` – The command line arguments to be passed to sendmail. Defaults to `-i -t`.
`raise_delivery_errors` | Whether or not errors should be raised if the email fails to be delivered.
`delivery_method` | Defines a delivery method. Possible values are `:smtp` (default), `:sendmail`, `:file` and `:test`.
`perform_deliveries` | Determines whether deliveries are actually carried out when the `deliver` method is invoked on the Mail message. By default they are, but this can be turned off to help functional testing.
`deliveries` | Keeps an array of all the emails sent out through the Action Mailer with delivery_method :test. Most useful for unit and functional testing.

#### 5.1 Example Action Mailer Configuration

An example would be adding the following to your appropriate `config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb` file:

    config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail
    # Defaults to:
    # config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings = {
    #   :location => '/usr/sbin/sendmail',
    #   :arguments => '-i -t'
    # }
    config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
    config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true

#### 5.2 Action Mailer Configuration for GMail

As Action Mailer now uses the Mail gem, this becomes as simple as adding to your `config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb` file:

    config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
    config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
      :address              => "smtp.gmail.com",
      :port                 => 587,
      :domain               => 'baci.lindsaar.net',
      :user_name            => '<username>',
      :password             => '<password>',
      :authentication       => 'plain',
      :enable_starttls_auto => true  }

### 6 Mailer Testing

By default Action Mailer does not send emails in the test environment. They are just added to the `ActionMailer::Base.deliveries` array.

Testing mailers normally involves two things: One is that the mail was queued, and the other one that the email is correct. With that in mind, we could test our example mailer from above like so:

    class UserMailerTest < ActionMailer::TestCase
      def test_welcome_email
        user = users(:some_user_in_your_fixtures)

        # Send the email, then test that it got queued
        email = UserMailer.welcome_email(user).deliver
        assert !ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.empty?

        # Test the body of the sent email contains what we expect it to
        assert_equal [user.email], email.to
        assert_equal "Welcome to My Awesome Site", email.subject
        assert_match(/<h1>Welcome to example.com, #{user.name}<\/h1>/, email.encoded)
        assert_match(/Welcome to example.com, #{user.name}/, email.encoded)
      end
    end

In the test we send the email and store the returned object in the `email` variable. We then ensure that it was sent (the first assert), then, in the second batch of assertions, we ensure that the email does indeed contain what we expect.

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