Action Mailer allows Rails applications to send and receive emails. It provides configuration options like specifying an SMTP server or delivery method. Email messages can be generated by creating Mailers with methods that define the recipient, subject, body, and other email fields. A controller handles calling these mailer methods to send emails. Views can contain a form to collect email content that gets passed to the controller and used to deliver emails through the mailer.

1. Action Mailer Action Mailer is the Rails component that enables applications to send and receive e-mail. In this chapter we will see how to send an email using Rails. So lets start with creating a emails project using following command. C:ubyamp;gt; rails emails This will create required framework to proceed. Now we will start with configuring Action Mailer. Action Mailer - Configuration Following are the steps you have to follow to complete your configuration before proceeding with actual work: Go into config folder of your emails project and open environment.rb file and add the following line at the bottom of this file. ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp

2. This tells ActionMailer that you want to user SMTP server. You can also set it to be :sendmail if you are using a Unix-based operating system such as Mac OS X or Linux. Add the following lines of code to the bottom of your environment.rb as well. ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = { :address => "smtp.site.com", :port => 25, :domain => “site.com", :authentication => :login, :user_name => "username", :password => "password", } Replace each hash value with proper settings for your Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server. You can take this information from your Internet Service Provider if you already don't know. You don't need to change port number 25 and authentication type if you are using standard SMTP server. You may also change the default email message format. If you prefer to send email in HTML instead of plain text format, add the following line to config/environment.rb as well:

3. ActionMailer::Base.default_content_type = "text/html" ActionMailer::Base.default_content_type could be set to "text/plain", "text/html", and "text/enriched". The default value is "text/plain". Next step will be to create a mailer Generate a mailer: Use the following command to generate a mailer as follows: C:ubyamp;gt; cd emails C:ubymails> ruby script/generate mailer Emailer This will create a file emailer.rb in appodels directory. Check the content of this file is as follows:

4. class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base end Let's create one method as follows. class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base def contact(recipient, subject, message, sent_at = Time.now) @subject = subject @recipients = recipient @from = 'no-reply@yourdomain.com' @sent_on = sent_at @body["title"] = 'This is title' @body["email"] = 'sender@yourdomain.com' @body["message"] = message end end The contact method has four parameters a recipient, subject, message and a sent_at, which defines when the e-mail is sent. The method also defines six standard parameters that are a part of every ActionMailer method:

6. @body is a Ruby hash that contains values with which you can populate the mail template. You created three key-value pairs: title, email, and message

7. @recipients is a list of the people to whom the message is being sent.

8. @from defines who the e-mail is from.

10. Now let's define our view in appiewsmailsndex.rhtml <h1>Send Email</h1> <%= start_form_tag :action => 'sendmail' %> <p><label for="email_subject">Subject</label>: <%= text_field 'email', 'subject' %></p> <p><label for="email_recipient">Recipient</label>: <%= text_field 'email', 'recipient' %></p> <p><label for="email_message">Message</label><br/> <%= text_area 'email', 'message' %></p> <%= submit_tag "Send" %> <%= end_form_tag %>