Sending email in Rails via GMail & using HAML with Action Mailer

August 6, 2009 by Noel Gomez
Filed under: General

Sending Email via Gmail

I was following the Action Mailer Rails Guide to set up outbound email from my app and I came across a problem when trying to use GMail. Many blog posts and the Rails guide point to plugins which enable TLS. I kept running into a wall and getting this error:

wrong number of arguments (3 for 2)

Luckily I finally found there is a very simple solution which is defined in the Rails API in ActionMailer::Base. This essentially says that Section 5.2 of the Rails Guide can be simplified by adding an additional parameter to the smtp_settings:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
   :enable_starttls_auto => true, 
   :address => "smtp.gmail.com", 
   :port => 587, 
   :domain => "domain.com", 
   :user_name => "user@domain.com", 
   :password => "password", 
   :authentication => :plain 
}

There is no plugin / gem needed, but you must be on Ruby 1.8.7

From the Rails API:

  :enable_starttls_auto - When set to true, detects if STARTTLS is enabled in your
  SMTP server and starts to use it. It works only on Ruby >= 1.8.7 and Ruby >= 1.9. 
  Default is true.

Using HAML with ActionMailer

Section 5.3 of the Rails Guide also mentions a configuration setting to get Action Mailer to recognize HAML templates. This configuration is not needed. As I found here.

I added comments to the Rails Guide Lighthouse ticket, so hopefully the guide will be updated.

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