So, in the last two tips, I have shown how to check the format of the email and save the actual address only in the database. But how to check that the email domain name is valid? Easy!

So you have an email address field on a form in Rails, but how are you going to make sure that all those users enter a sane and well formatted email address? Here is a simple fix to that problem.

Did you know that Rails has inbuilt a strong email handling library called (ahem) TMail? I just so happen to maintain this now (Minero Aoki wrote it), but it gives you a great way to validate email addresses…

If you are using a Ruby on Rails app, or Nitro, or just a plain Ruby application that handles email, you will need to handle at some point, bounced messages. This a simple way to get to the guts of the email and find out what the error codes are…

Well, 1.2.2 is now released. You can get the latest version by gem install tmail or download from the TMail Rubyforge project

I recently added a new page to the TMail site, contributing!

Ruby on Rails 2.0 includes the ability to load a gem version of TMail instead of the bundled version inside of ActionMailer. However, if you are running on Rails 1.2.6, this doesn’t help you much. Here is how you take advantage of the latest fixes to the TMail library and stay in the 1.2.x branch of Rails

I might be biased, I might be talking from a lack of experience, but if you are reading this and you are not involved in an open source project, then you are not a real programmer…

THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE

SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot’s Monopurpose Programming Language
Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for
Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code
with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN,
END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can’t make
a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus
they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without
the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.

(Care of OpenBSD forturne)

TMail 1.2.0 is now out. Here are the gory bits:

We are about to release TMail 1.2.0…

ActiveRecord works well when we are saving strings and integers, but what if you want to save a real, live, honest-to-God Ruby OBJECT like a TMail::Mail instance?? Well.. serialize to the rescue!

TMail::Mail instances had an instance method called create_forward hidden away in net.rb. We move it up into the big time with ticket 15445

Today, while doing some documentation on the TMail library, I found an interesting method declaration in the interface.rb file that has me stumped…

As mentioned previously in the TMail blog, I am now maintaining the code base with another team member. But where to start?