How to use Mail / ActionMailer 3 with GMail SMTP

Getting Mail (and therefore ActionMailer 3) working with GMail SMTP is crazy simple, if you know how.

The secret is actually in the Mail RDoc, but to save you looking, here you are:

Mail allows you to send emails using SMTP. This is done by wrapping Net::SMTP in
an easy to use manner.

Sending via SMTP server on Localhost

Sending locally (to a postfix or sendmail server running on localhost) requires
no special setup. Just do

Mail.deliver do
       to 'mikel@test.lindsaar.net'
     from 'ada@test.lindsaar.net'
  subject 'testing sendmail'
     body 'testing sendmail'
end

# Or:

mail = Mail.new do
       to 'mikel@test.lindsaar.net'
     from 'ada@test.lindsaar.net'
  subject 'testing sendmail'
     body 'testing sendmail'
end

mail.deliver

And your email will be fired off to your localhost SMTP server.

Sending via GMail

To send out via GMail, you need to configure the Mail::SMTP class to have the correct values, so to try this out, open up IRB and type the following:

require 'mail'
options = { :address              => "smtp.gmail.com",
            :port                 => 587,
            :domain               => 'your.host.name',
            :user_name            => '<username>',
            :password             => '<password>',
            :authentication       => 'plain',
            :enable_starttls_auto => true  }

Mail.defaults do
  delivery_method :smtp, options
end

The last block calls Mail.defaults which allows us to set the global delivery method for all mail objects that get created from now on. Power user tip, you don’t have to use the global method, you can define the delivery_method directly on any individual Mail::Message object and have different delivery agents per email, this is useful if you are building an application that has multiple users with different servers handling their email.

Delivering the email

Once you have the settings right, sending the email is done the same way as you would for a local host delivery default:

Mail.deliver do
       to 'mikel@test.lindsaar.net'
     from 'ada@test.lindsaar.net'
  subject 'testing sendmail'
     body 'testing sendmail'
end

Or by calling deliver on a Mail message

mail = Mail.new do
       to 'mikel@test.lindsaar.net'
     from 'ada@test.lindsaar.net'
  subject 'testing sendmail'
     body 'testing sendmail'
end

mail.deliver

Combining this with ActionMailer 3

So as ActionMailer 3 uses Mail as it’s email transport agent, all you have to do is pass the same options Hash into ActionMailer:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address              => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port                 => 587,
  :domain               => 'your.host.name',
  :user_name            => '<username>',
  :password             => '<password>',
  :authentication       => 'plain',
  :enable_starttls_auto => true  }
}

Hope that helps!

blogLater

Mikel