Action Mailer is a framework for designing email-service layers. These layers are used to consolidate code for sending out forgotten passwords, welcome wishes on signup, invoices for billing, and any other use case that requires a written notification to either a person or another system.

Action Mailer is in essence a wrapper around Action Controller and the Mail gem. It provides a way to make emails using templates in the same way that Action Controller renders views using templates.

Additionally, an Action Mailer class can be used to process incoming email, such as allowing a blog to accept new posts from an email (which could even have been sent from a phone).

The framework works by initializing any instance variables you want to be available in the email template, followed by a call to mail to deliver the email.

This can be as simple as:

class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
  delivers_from '[email protected]'

  def welcome(recipient)
    @recipient = recipient
    mail(:to => recipient,
         :subject => "[Signed up] Welcome #{recipient}")
  end
end

The body of the email is created by using an Action View template (regular ERB) that has the instance variables that are declared in the mailer action.

So the corresponding body template for the method above could look like this:

Hello there,

Mr. <%= @recipient %>

Thank you for signing up!

And if the recipient was given as “[email protected]”, the email generated would look like this:

Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:48:09 +1100
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Subject: [Signed up] Welcome [email protected]
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="US-ASCII";
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello there,

Mr. [email protected]

Thank you for signing up!

In previous version of Rails you would call create_method_name and deliver_method_name. Rails 3.0 has a much simpler interface, you simply call the method and optionally call deliver on the return value.

Calling the method returns a Mail Message object:

message = Notifier.welcome  # => Returns a Mail::Message object
message.deliver             # => delivers the email

Or you can just chain the methods together like:

Notifier.welcome.deliver    # Creates the email and sends it immediately

It is possible to set default values that will be used in every method in your Action Mailer class. To implement this functionality, you just call the public class method default which you get for free from ActionMailer::Base. This method accepts a Hash as the parameter. You can use any of the headers e-mail messages has, like :from as the key. You can also pass in a string as the key, like “Content-Type”, but Action Mailer does this out of the box for you, so you won’t need to worry about that. Finally it is also possible to pass in a Proc that will get evaluated when it is needed.

Note that every value you set with this method will get over written if you use the same key in your mailer method.

Example:

class Authenticationmailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default :from => "[email protected]", :subject => Proc.new { "E-mail was generated at #{Time.now}" }
  .....
end

To receive emails, you need to implement a public instance method called receive that takes an email object as its single parameter. The Action Mailer framework has a corresponding class method, which is also called receive, that accepts a raw, unprocessed email as a string, which it then turns into the email object and calls the receive instance method.

Example:

class Mailman < 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

This Mailman can be the target for Postfix or other MTAs. In Rails, you would use the runner in the trivial case like this:

rails runner 'Mailman.receive(STDIN.read)'

However, invoking Rails in the runner for each mail to be received is very resource intensive. A single instance of Rails should be run within a daemon, if it is going to be utilized to process more than just a limited number of email.

The Base class has the full list of configuration options. Here’s an example:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address        => 'smtp.yourserver.com', # default: localhost
  :port           => '25',                  # default: 25
  :user_name      => 'user',
  :password       => 'pass',
  :authentication => :plain                 # :plain, :login or :cram_md5
}

The latest version of Action Mailer can be installed with RubyGems:

% [sudo] gem install actionmailer

Source code can be downloaded as part of the Rails project on GitHub

• github.com/rails/rails/tree/master/actionmailer

Action Mailer is released under the MIT license.

API documentation is at

• api.rubyonrails.org

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed with the rest for the Ruby on Rails project here:

• github.com/rails/rails/issues