Sending email with Rails Mailers, The Random bits...

See the rails guides and railscasts for getting started with Rails Mailers; 
this article includes some additional information on Rails Mailers not included in those articles.

RailsCasts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/206-action-mailer-in-rails-3
Rails Guides: "Action Mailer Basics" on the rails guides - The guide covers all of the common mailer tasks

• setup and configuration
• attachments
• layouts

Random Bits

These examples were created using rails 3.2

Add importance headers

	# importance flag on the email
	headers['Importance'] = 'high'
	headers['X-Priority'] = '1'
	headers['X-MSMail-Priority'] = 'High'

view raw rails_mailer_importance_headers.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

NOTE: many email clients will ignore these headers

Add receipt header

	# require email receipt
	headers['Return-Receipt-To'] = 'confirm@example.com'

view raw rails_mailer_recipt_header.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

NOTE: many email clients will ignore these headers

Testing mailer headers with rspec

If you have rspec-rails gem installed with your rails application then running the generator will stub out most of your mailer tests, including a fixture file for the mailer view, which you may or may not want to remove.

mail.header['X-MSMail-Priority'].value.should == 'High'

view raw rails_mailer_rspec_header.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

NOTE: test against mail.header, not mail.headers

Use a different layout for some Mailer actions

our default layout is the customer facing one but we want to override it in some cases

	class ExampleMailer < ActionMailer::Base
	default from: "from@example.com"
	# default layout for ExampleMailer
	layout "customer_email"
	# the order ready is sent to the customer and uses the default layout - customer_email
	def order_ready
	@greeting = "Hi"
	mail to: "to@example.org"
	end
	# the ready to ship email is internal only - use the internal layout
	def ready_to_ship
	@greeting = "Hi Hi"
	mail(to: "internal@example.org") do |format|
	format.html { render :layout => "internal_email" }
	format.text { render :layout => "internal_email" }
	end
	end
	end

view raw rails_mailer_alternate_layout.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub