Douglas F Shearer

GMail SMTP with Ruby on Rails and ActionMailer

Trying to use GMail SMTP (or some other SMTP authenticated with TLS) with ActiveRecord to send email in Ruby on Rails? Up till now this involved requiring smtp_tls.rb in your environment.

Thankfully, Kyle Maxwell has come up with a neater solution.

Install

It’s a plugin, which you can get with this command in your Rails root…

./script/plugin install http://svn.kylemaxwell.com/rails_plugins/action_mailer_optional_tls/trunk/

Due to continued downtime of Kyle’s site please use the following URl:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/collectiveidea/action_mailer_optional_tls.git

Setup

You can turn TLS authentication on and off as you need in your environment with a new key that is added to the smtp config, tls. To use with gmail, the following should be in your environment.rb…

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
    :tls => true,
    :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
    :port => "587",
    :domain => "YOURDOMAIN",
    :authentication => :plain,
    :user_name => "GOOGLEUSERNAME",
    :password => "GOOGLEPASSWORD"
  }

And that’s it. Enjoy.