Mandrill Mailer gem

MandrilMailer class for sending transactional emails through mandril. Only template based emails are supported at this time.

Usage

Add gem 'mandrill_mailer' to your Gemfile

Add this to your mail.rb in initializers. You don't need to add the ActionMailer stuff unless your still using ActionMailer emails. This just plugs into the Mandrill smtp servers. If your doing template based emails through the Mandrill api you really only need the MandrillMailer.configure part

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
    :address   => "smtp.mandrillapp.com",
    :port      => 587,
    :user_name => ENV['MANDRILL_USERNAME'],
    :password  => ENV['MANDRILL_PASSWORD'],
    :domain    => 'heroku.com'
  }
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp

MandrillMailer.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = ENV['MANDRILL_API_KEY']
end

Don't forget to setup your ENV variables on your server

You will also need to set default_url_options for the mailer, similar to action mailer in your environment config files:

config.mandrill_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'localhost' }

Creating a new mailer

Creating a new Mandrill Mailer is similar to a normal Rails mailer:

 class InvitationMailer < MandrillMailer::TemplateMailer
   default from: 'support@example.com'

   def invite(invitation)
     mandrill_mail template: 'Group Invite',
       subject: I18n.t('invitation_mailer.invite.subject'),
       to: {email: invitation.email, name: 'Honored Guest'},
       vars: {
         'OWNER_NAME' => invitation.owner_name,
         'INVITATION_URL' => new_invitation_url(email: invitation.email, secret: invitation.secret)
       }
   end
 end

• #default:

  • :from - set the default from email address for the mailer

• .mandrill_mail

  • :template(required) - Template name from within Mandrill
  • :subject(required) - Subject of the email
  • :to(required) - Accepts an email String, or hash with :name and :email keys ex. {email: 'someone@email.com', name: 'Bob Bertly'}
  • :vars - A Hash of merge tags made available to the email. Use them in the email by wrapping them in *||* vars: => 'Suzy' is used by doing: *|OWNER_NAME|* in the email template within Mandrill
  • :template_content - A Hash of values and content for Mandrill editable content blocks. In MailChimp templates there are editable regions with 'mc:edit' attributes that look a little like: <div mc:edit="header">My email content</div> You can insert content directly into these fields by passing a Hash {'header' => 'my email content'}
  • :headers - Extra headers to add to the message (currently only Reply-To and X-* headers are allowed) "..."
  • :bcc - Add an email to bcc to
  • :tags - Array of Strings to tag the message with. Stats are accumulated using tags, though we only store the first 100 we see, so this should not be unique or change frequently. Tags should be 50 characters or less. Any tags starting with an underscore are reserved for internal use and will cause errors.
  • :google_analytics_domains - Array of Strings indicating for which any matching URLs will automatically have Google Analytics parameters appended to their query string automatically.
  • :google_analytics_campaign - String indicating the value to set for the utm_campaign tracking parameter. If this isn't provided the email's from address will be used instead.

Sending an email

You can send the email by using the familiar syntax:

InvitationMailer.invite(invitation).deliver

Creating a test method

When switching over to Mandrill for transactional emails we found that it was hard to setup a mailer in the console to send test emails easily (those darn designers), but really, you don't want to have to setup test objects everytime you want to send a test email. You can set up a testing 'mock' once and then call the .test method to send the test email.

You can test the above email by typing: InvitationMailer.test(:invite, email:<your email>) into the Rails Console.

The test for this particular Mailer is setup like so:

test_setup_for :invite do |mailer, options|
    invitation = MandrillMailer::Mock.new({
      email: options[:email],
      owner_name: 'foobar',
      secret: rand(9000000..1000000).to_s
    })
    mailer.invite(invitation).deliver
end

Use MandrillMailer::Mock to mock out objects.

If in order to represent a url within a mock, make sure there is a url or path attribute, for example, if I had a course mock and I was using the course_url route helper within the mailer I would create the mock like so:

course = MandrillMailer::Mock.new({
  title: 'zombies',
  type: 'Ruby',
  url: 'http://funzone.com/zombies'
})

This would ensure that course_url(course) works as expected.

The mailer and options passed to the .test method are yielded to the block.

The :email option is the only required option, make sure to add at least this to your test object.

TODO

Either get rid of the mailchimp gem dependancy or hook into actionmailer like the mailchimp does to send normal emails.