Contrary to popular (?) belief, your app folder’s content is not restricted to models, controllers, helpers and views. You can through some other stuff in there as well!

So, in the last two tips, I have shown how to check the format of the email and save the actual address only in the database. But how to check that the email domain name is valid? Easy!

So you have an email address field on a form in Rails, but how are you going to make sure that all those users enter a sane and well formatted email address? Here is a simple fix to that problem.

Did you know that Rails has inbuilt a strong email handling library called (ahem) TMail? I just so happen to maintain this now (Minero Aoki wrote it), but it gives you a great way to validate email addresses…

If you are using a Ruby on Rails app, or Nitro, or just a plain Ruby application that handles email, you will need to handle at some point, bounced messages. This a simple way to get to the guts of the email and find out what the error codes are…

Well, 1.2.2 is now released. You can get the latest version by gem install tmail or download from the TMail Rubyforge project

I recently added a new page to the TMail site, contributing!

So Rails 2.0 is out! But how do you upgrade? I wrote an article on this a couple of weeks ago on how to update to Rails RC 2. I just reviewed it and it still has basically the correct content, so I just updated it to Rails 2.0. Go have a read if you want, it is called Updating to Rails 2.0 RC

Ruby on Rails 2.0 includes the ability to load a gem version of TMail instead of the bundled version inside of ActionMailer. However, if you are running on Rails 1.2.6, this doesn’t help you much. Here is how you take advantage of the latest fixes to the TMail library and stay in the 1.2.x branch of Rails

ActiveRecord works well when we are saving strings and integers, but what if you want to save a real, live, honest-to-God Ruby OBJECT like a TMail::Mail instance?? Well.. serialize to the rescue!

TMail::Mail instances had an instance method called create_forward hidden away in net.rb. We move it up into the big time with ticket 15445

As mentioned previously in the TMail blog, I am now maintaining the code base with another team member. But where to start?

TMail is quite an extensive mailing library that is suffering from incredibly documentation pains.

The easy stuff is simple, like @mail.to gives you the to address of the email, and @mail.to=”something” sets the to address to something.

But there are some other things that TMail can do to make your life simple and easy and I am going to document them here on this blog.

Recently there was a bug request 15445 on the create_forward function.

I have fixed this bug and closed the ticket and merged the changes back into trunk of TMail.

But what this means now is that you can do the following:

1
2
3
4
5

mail = TMail::Mail.load("/path/to/my_email_message")
forwarded_email = @mail.create_forward
forwarded_email.to = "New address <me@me.com>"
text = "Dear me\n\nHere is that email I was talking about!\n"
forwarded_email.body = text

And then you can just send the forwarded_email.

“create_forward” nicely takes the existing email, encodes it into 7-bit ASCII, and the inserts it as an attachment to a new email which it returns to you… Handy :)

“create_forward” is an existing method that has been moved into the main interface.rb file of TMail which means that it will be available to any mail object with a simple require ‘tmail’ in your ruby or rails code.

Hope you enjoy it!

blogLater

Mikel

TMail is the mail library that powers ActionMailer in Ruby on Rails and the mail component of Nitro… and it is alive!