Sending Email through SMTP mailer in Rails

As we know these days in almost every application we have the need to send mails to its users then be it for password confirmations, subscriptions etc.

So these mails can be sent through your rails application with the help of SMTP that is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. We will be sending mails via gmail. For the purpose of sending emails, the action mailer class is used.

First of all you need to enable the less secure apps in your gmail settings which will allow less secure apps to access your gmail account. You can do the same through this link https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

• Creating a mailer in our rails application.

Our rails application already have a mailer folder in which our mailer filers are present. So first we will create a mailer through our console like this

$ rails g mailer notification_mailer

after this, some files will be created as follows 

Running via Spring preloader in process 5666
      create  app/mailers/notification_mailer.rb
      create  app/mailers/application_mailer.rb
      invoke  erb
      create    app/views/notification_mailer
      create    app/views/layouts/mailer.text.erb
      create    app/views/layouts/mailer.html.erb
      invoke  test_unit
      create    test/mailers/notification_mailer_test.rb
      create    test/mailers/previews/notification_mailer_preview.rb

• Now go to the folder app/mailers and create a file notification_mailer.rb. This file will contain our default email ID through which the mails have to be sent and a method in which we will define where the mail has to be sent like this

class NotificationMailer < ApplicationMailer

  default from: "abc@gmail.com"

  def notification_email(receiver_email)
    @recipient = receiver_email
    mail(to: receiver_email, subject: 'This is a dummy email for testing!')
  end
end

• After this we will be creating the content or the body part of the mail in our views. For that go to the folder  app/views/notification_mailer and create a file notification_email.html.erb.

<h1>Hi <%= @recipient%></h1>
<p>
  This is a sample mail generated for testing purposes.
</p>
<h3>Regards</h3>
<h2>Admin</h2>

• Now next thing is to configure our mailers in the environment files development.rb and production.rb in the config/environment/ folder like this

  config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true #try to force sending in development
  config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true #to raise any errors while sending mail

  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
    :address              => "smtp.gmail.com",
    :port                 =>  587,
    :user_name            => 'abc@gmail.com',
    :password             => your_password,
    :authentication       => "plain",
    :enable_starttls_auto => true
  }

• Now last thing is to call the mailer method from the controller method from where you want to initiate the mail sending process. You can call the function like this

NotificationMailer.notification_email("def@gmail.com").deliver_now

And here you go. Now as soon as the method will be called, the mail will be sent to the user successfully.