Ruby on Rails SMTP Integration Guide

Guide to integrate Mailazy with your Ruby on Rails application


Prerequisites

You need to complete these given prerequisites, you can skip the step if you have already completed.

  1. Sign up for a Mailazy account.
  2. Complete Domain Authentication.
  3. Generate the Mailazy Access Key

Integrate Mailazy with Ruby on Rails

This example shows how to send an email for user signups. You can also check out this gem for more advanced features.

Setup ActionMailer

Let's generate a Mailer class. Mailer classes function as our controllers for email views.

$ rails generate mailer UserNotifierMailer

Now we open up the mailer we've just generated, app/mailers/usernotifiermailer.rb and add a mailer action that sends users a signup email.

class UserNotifierMailer < ApplicationMailer
default :from => 'any_from_address@example.com'
# send a signup email to the user, pass in the user object that contains the user's email address
def send_signup_email(user)
@user  = user
mail( :to =>  @user.email,
:subject => 'Thanks for signing up for our amazing app' )
end
end

Now we need a view that corresponds to our action and outputs HTML for our email. Create a file app/views/usernotifiermailer/sendsignupemail.html.erb as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type' />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Thanks for signing up, <%= @user.name %>!</h1>
<p>Thanks for joining and have a great day! Now sign in and do awesome things!</p>
</body>
</html>

If you don't have a user model quite yet, generate one quickly.

$ rails generate scaffold user name email login
$ rake db:migrate

Now in the controller for the user model app/controllers/userscontroller.rb, add a call to UserNotifierMailer.sendsignup_email when a user is saved.

class UsersController < ApplicationController
def create
# Create the user from params
@user  = User.new(user_params)
if  @user.save
# Deliver the signup email
UserNotifierMailer.send_signup_email(@user).deliver
redirect_to(@user, :notice => 'User created')
else
render :action => 'new'
end
end

private
def user_params
params.require(:user).permit(:name, :email, :login)
end
end

Alright, now we're cooking! Let's get it all going through Mailazy.

Configure ActionMailer to Use Mailazy

In config/environment.rb specify your ActionMailer settings to point to Mailazy's servers.

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:user_name => 'mailazy_apikey', # This is the string literal 'mailazy_apikey', NOT the ID of your API key
:password => 'mailazy_secret', # This is the secret mailazy secret key which was issued during API key creation
:address => 'smtp.mailazy.com',
:port =>  587,
:authentication => :plain,
:enable_starttls_auto =>  true
}

That's it! When a new user object is saved, an email will be sent to the user via Mailazy.

As a best practice, you should not store your credentials directly in the source but should instead store them in configuration files or environment variables. See this tutorial on environment variables in Rails. And for Rails Versions 5.2+ see Securely storing custom credentials in Rails.