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Action Mailer Basics
This guide provides 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.
After reading this guide, you will know:
- How to send and receive email within a Rails application.
- How to generate and edit an Action Mailer class and mailer view.
- How to configure Action Mailer for your environment.
- How to test your Action Mailer classes.
Introduction
Action Mailer allows you to send emails from your application using mailer classes and views. Mailers work very similarly to controllers. They inherit from ActionMailer::Base
and live in app/mailers
, and they have associated views that appear in app/views
.
Sending Emails
This section will provide a step-by-step guide to creating a mailer and its views.
Walkthrough to Generating a Mailer
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/mailers/user_mailer_test.rb
As you can see, you can generate mailers just like you use other generators with Rails. Mailers are conceptually similar to controllers, and so we get a mailer, a directory for views, and a test.
If you didn't want to use a generator, you could create your own file inside of
app/mailers, just make sure that it inherits from ActionMailer::Base
:
class MyMailer < ActionMailer::Base
end
Edit the Mailer
Mailers are very similar to Rails controllers. They also have methods called "actions" and use views to structure the content. Where a controller generates content like HTML to send back to the client, a Mailer creates a message to be delivered via email.
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 from this mailer. 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.
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>
Let's also make a text part for this email. Not all clients prefer HTML emails,
and so sending both is best practice. 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.
Calling the Mailer
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, let's create a simple User
scaffold:
$ rails generate scaffold user name email login
$ 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
The method welcome_email
returns a Mail::Message
object which can then just
be told deliver
to send itself out.
Auto encoding header values
Action Mailer handles the auto encoding of multibyte characters inside of headers and bodies.
For more complex examples such as defining alternate character sets or self-encoding text first, please refer to the Mail library.
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 callheaders[: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.
Adding Attachments
Action Mailer makes it very easy to add attachments.
-
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')
NOTE: Mail will automatically Base64 encode an attachment. If you want something
different, 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 }
NOTE: If you specify an encoding, Mail will assume that your content is already encoded and not try to Base64 encode it.
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.
-
First, 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, callingurl
on it and then passing the result into theimage_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' %>
Sending Email To Multiple Recipients
It is possible to send email to one or more recipients in one email (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: Proc.new { Admin.pluck(: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.
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 "Full 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
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
. You can also specify an array of paths for template_path
, and they
will be searched in order.
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.
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, call layout
in your mailer:
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.
Generating URLs in Action Mailer Views
Unlike controllers, the mailer instance doesn't have any context about the
incoming request so you'll need to provide the :host
parameter yourself.
As the :host
usually is consistent across the application you can configure it
globally in config/application.rb
:
config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'example.com' }
generating URLs with url_for
You need to pass the only_path: false
option when using url_for
. This will
ensure that absolute URLs are generated because the url_for
view helper will,
by default, generate relative URLs when a :host
option isn't explicitly
provided.
<%= url_for(controller: 'welcome',
action: 'greeting',
only_path: false) %>
If you did not configure the :host
option globally make sure to pass it to
url_for
.
<%= url_for(host: 'example.com',
controller: 'welcome',
action: 'greeting') %>
NOTE: When you explicitly pass the :host
Rails will always generate absolute
URLs, so there is no need to pass only_path: false
.
generating URLs with named routes
Email clients have no web context and so paths have no base URL to form complete web addresses. Thus, you should always use the "_url" variant of named route helpers.
If you did not configure the :host
option globally make sure to pass it to the
url helper.
<%= user_url(@user, host: 'example.com') %>
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.
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.
Sending Emails with Dynamic Delivery Options
If you wish to override the default delivery options (e.g. SMTP credentials)
while delivering emails, you can do this using delivery_method_options
in the
mailer action.
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
def welcome_email(user, company)
@user = user
@url = user_url(@user)
delivery_options = { user_name: company.smtp_user,
password: company.smtp_password,
address: company.smtp_host }
mail(to: @user.email,
subject: "Please see the Terms and Conditions attached",
delivery_method_options: delivery_options)
end
end
Sending Emails without Template Rendering
There may be cases in which you want to skip the template rendering step and
supply the email body as a string. You can achieve this using the :body
option. In such cases don't forget to add the :content_type
option. Rails
will default to text/plain
otherwise.
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
def welcome_email(user, email_body)
mail(to: user.email,
body: email_body,
content_type: "text/html",
subject: "Already rendered!")
end
end
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/bin/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
Action Mailer Callbacks
Action Mailer allows for you to specify a before_action
, after_action
and
around_action
.
-
Filters can be specified with a block or a symbol to a method in the mailer class similar to controllers.
-
You could use a
before_action
to populate the mail object with defaults, delivery_method_options or insert default headers and attachments. -
You could use an
after_action
to do similar setup as abefore_action
but using instance variables set in your mailer action.
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
after_action :set_delivery_options,
:prevent_delivery_to_guests,
:set_business_headers
def feedback_message(business, user)
@business = business
@user = user
mail
end
def campaign_message(business, user)
@business = business
@user = user
end
private
def set_delivery_options
# You have access to the mail instance,
# @business and @user instance variables here
if @business && @business.has_smtp_settings?
mail.delivery_method.settings.merge!(@business.smtp_settings)
end
end
def prevent_delivery_to_guests
if @user && @user.guest?
mail.perform_deliveries = false
end
end
def set_business_headers
if @business
headers["X-SMTPAPI-CATEGORY"] = @business.code
end
end
end
- Mailer Filters abort further processing if body is set to a non-nil value.
Using Action Mailer Helpers
Action Mailer now just inherits from AbstractController
, so you have access to
the same generic helpers as you do in Action Controller.
Action Mailer Configuration
The following configuration options are best made in one of the environment files (environment.rb, production.rb, etc...)
Configuration | Description |
---|---|
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:
|
sendmail_settings |
Allows you to override options for the :sendmail delivery method.
|
raise_delivery_errors |
Whether or not errors should be raised if the email fails to be delivered. This only works if the external email server is configured for immediate delivery. |
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. |
default_options |
Allows you to set default values for the mail method options (:from , :reply_to , etc.). |
For a complete writeup of possible configurations see the Action Mailer section in our Configuring Rails Applications guide.
Example Action Mailer Configuration
An example would be adding the following to your appropriate
config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb
file:
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail
# Defaults to:
# config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings = {
# location: '/usr/sbin/sendmail',
# arguments: '-i -t'
# }
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
config.action_mailer.default_options = {from: 'no-reply@example.com'}
Action Mailer Configuration for Gmail
As Action Mailer now uses the Mail gem, this becomes as simple as adding to your
config/environments/$RAILS_ENV.rb
file:
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
address: 'smtp.gmail.com',
port: 587,
domain: 'example.com',
user_name: '<username>',
password: '<password>',
authentication: 'plain',
enable_starttls_auto: true }
Mailer Testing
You can find detailed instructions on how to test your mailers in the testing guide.
Intercepting Emails
There are situations where you need to edit an email before it's delivered. Fortunately Action Mailer provides hooks to intercept every email. You can register an interceptor to make modifications to mail messages right before they are handed to the delivery agents.
class SandboxEmailInterceptor
def self.delivering_email(message)
message.to = ['sandbox@example.com']
end
end
Before the interceptor can do its job you need to register it with the Action
Mailer framework. You can do this in an initializer file
config/initializers/sandbox_email_interceptor.rb
ActionMailer::Base.register_interceptor(SandboxEmailInterceptor) if Rails.env.staging?
NOTE: The example above uses a custom environment called "staging" for a production like server but for testing purposes. You can read Creating Rails environments for more information about custom Rails environments.