Sending email with Ruby on Rails 2.3.2+ and Gmail

I’ve seen several posts on using Gmail with Ruby on Rails ActionMailer, but had to go through a little trial and error to get it to work.

First, you’ll need collectiveidea’s action_mailer_optional_tls plugin:

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

Next, you’ll need to create a initializer file for ActionMailer (a lot of blog posts show this added to environment.rb, but I couldn’t get it to work until I moved everything to an initializer file):

config/initializers/gmail_smtp.rb
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => :true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "yourdomain",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "yourgmailusername",
:password => "yourpassword",
:tls => :true
}
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = :true
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = :true
ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = "utf-8"

Note: though Rails 2.3 is supposed to eliminate the need for this plugin, I still had to include it with Rails 2.3. I believe I read it will work with Ruby 1.8.7, but not 1.8.6, but haven’t had time to test it.

http://douglasfshearer.com/blog/gmail-smtp-with-ruby-on-rails-and-actionmailer