Mail, TMail, The Future of Ruby Email Handling

Thu Sep 17 11:29:43 -0700 2009

You may know I maintain the TMail library. Well, recently I’ve been working on the next version.

TMail was getting hard to maintain and monkey patch. It’s implementation does not take into account many little things that create a problem when trying to get Ruby 1.9 compatibility working.

Anyway, I started working on Mail… code speaks louder than words… so Mail can do the following right now:

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Mail.defaults do
  smtp '127.0.0.1'
end

Mail.deliver do
  to 'nicolas@test.lindsaar.net.au'
  from 'Mikel Lindsaar <mikel@test.lindsaar.net.au>'
  subject 'First multipart email sent with Mail'
  text_part do
    body 'Here is the attachment you wanted'
  end
  html_part do
    content_type 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'
    body '<h1>Funky Title</h1><p>Here it is</p>'
  end
  add_file :filename => '/path/to/myfile.pdf'
end

And you just sent a multipart text and html email with an attachment!

Mail is my attempt to just HANDLE the problem of Ruby Email handling.

I developed it from the ground up with complete spec coverage… I am not quite at 100%... but very close. It is also a completely object oriented design and pure ruby too!

Mail tries it’s darn hardest not to crash. In fact it already checks every email in the TMail test suite and doesn’t crash once on parsing any of the emails in there.

In any case, I now have pretty much all the basic email and mime and attachment handlings working. Next up is handling multiple character sets in the header and body.

You are welcome to check it out from my GitHub account

It’s version 0.1 right now… but expect to see the multi character set support soon.

Forks and patches welcome!

Mikel

  1. Georg Ledermann Says:
    Tue Sep 22 16:32:47 -0700 2009

    After struggling with TMail in my current Rails app I would appreciate it very much to have a modern Mail gem.

    But please, don’t forget the old TMail gem until it’s fully replaced by Mail. I tried to install the TMail gem from github without luck. I have described the issue here: http://github.com/mikel/tmail/issues#issue/4

    It seems it’s not easy to use the current fixes of TMail and replace the embedded gem of ActionMailer.

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