reason for fork

The purpose of this fork is to keep an archive of sent/unsent emails. The archive is kept for 30 days by default, but can be configured to use any timeperiod by using the –max-archive-age switch.

The Email class (or whatever you prefer to call it) in this fork has different attributes than the original.

ar_mailer

A two-phase delivery agent for ActionMailer

Rubyforge Project:

rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb

Documentation:

seattlerb.org/ar_mailer

and for forked additions

github.com/adzap/ar_mailer/wikis

Bugs:

adzap.lighthouseapp.com/projects/26997-ar_mailer

About

Even delivering email to the local machine may take too long when you have to send hundreds of messages. ar_mailer allows you to store messages into the database for later delivery by a separate process, ar_sendmail.

Installing ar_mailer (forked)

Before installing you will need to make sure the original gem is uninstalled as they can’t coexist:

$ sudo gem uninstall ar_mailer

Install the gem from GitHub gems server:

First, if you haven’t already:

$ sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

Then

$ sudo gem install dvdplm-ar_mailer

For Rails >= 2.1, in your environment.rb:

config.gem "dvdplm-ar_mailer", :lib => 'action_mailer/ar_mailer', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

For Rails 2.0, in an initializer file:

require 'action_mailer/ar_mailer'

Usage

Go to your Rails project:

$ cd your_rails_project

Create a new migration:

$ ar_sendmail --create-migration

You’ll need to redirect this into a file. If you want a different name provide the –table-name option.

Create a new model:

$ ar_sendmail --create-model

You’ll need to redirect this into a file. If you want a different name provide the –table-name option.

You’ll need to be sure to set the From address for your emails. Something like:

def list_send(recipient)
  from 'no_reply@example.com'
  # ...

Edit config/environments/production.rb and set the delivery method:

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :activerecord

Or if you need to, you can set each mailer class delivery method individually:

class MyMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  self.delivery_method = :activerecord
end

This can be useful when using plugins like ExceptionNotification. Where it might be foolish to tie the sending of the email alert to the database when the database might be causing the exception being raised. In this instance you could override ExceptionNofitier delivery method to be smtp or set the other mailer classes to use ARMailer explicitly.

Then to run it:

$ ar_sendmail

You can also run it from cron with -o, or as a daemon with -d.

See ar_sendmail -h for full details.

Alternate Mail Storage

If you want to set the ActiveRecord model that emails will be stored in, see ActionMailer::Base.email_class=

A Word on TLS

If you are using Ruby >= 1.8.7, TLS will be enabled automatically if your SMTP server supports it. If you do not want it to automatically enabled then set the :tls option to false in your smtp_settings.

If you are on Ruby <= 1.8.6, then the TLS patch included in this plugin will be loaded, so you don’t need another TLS plugin to add the capability. This patch allows you to explicit set if the server supports TLS by setting the :tls option to true in your smtp_settings.

Help

See ar_sendmail -h for options to ar_sendmail.

NOTE: You may need to delete an smtp_tls.rb file if you have one lying around. ar_mailer supplies it own.

Run as a service (init.d/rc.d scripts)

For Linux both script and demo config files are in share/linux. See ar_sendmail.conf for setting up your config. Copy the ar_sendmail file to /etc/init.d/ and make it executable. Then for Debian based distros run ‘sudo update-rc.d ar_sendmail defaults’ and it should work. Make sure you have the config file /etc/ar_sendmail.conf in place before starting.

For FreeBSD or NetBSD script is share/bsd/ar_sendmail. This is old and does not support the config file unless someone wants to submit a patch.