Sending E-mail with Rails via Gmail (Spoiler Alert! this is for dummies)

Yes, Rails is super cool, everything is super easy, and so far I really fall in love with it. But why is it that hard to send an e-mail via Gmail !?!

So after messing up a couple of git branches, I finally get it work, yey!

Here are the steps:

• Watch the railscast about sending email
• Install the gem with TLS

sudo gem install ambethia-smtp-tls -v '1.1.2' --source http://gems.github.com

• Add the following to your environment.rb (Be careful after the Rails::Initializer.run do |config| block. )

#to the top of file
require 'smtp-tls'

...
#to the very end of the file
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings =
{
    :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
    :port => 587,
    :domain => "gmail.com",
    :user_name => "dkberktas",#not with @gmail.com
    :password => "xxxyyyzzz",
    :authentication => :plain,
    :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

• Run the mailer generator by

script/generate mailer user_mailer

• Go to UserMailer class and add the method

  def registration_confirmation()
    recipients  "xxx@gmail.com"
    from        "xxx@gmail.com"
    subject     "Thank you for being that awesome"
    body        "no I am just kidding" #if you want to pass parameter do it like this -- > ":user => user"
  end

• Add a sample method to application controller and add it to the routes.rb

#in application controller
  def mailDeneme
    UserMailer.deliver_registration_confirmation()
    render :text => "OK"
  end
#in routes.rb
map.mail  '/mail',  :controller => 'application', :action => 'mailDeneme'

If you see an error like this:

Net::SMTPAuthenticationError (530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first.

You miss the item above about  installing smtp-tls gem. Read it again again, or check this forum post.

ps. This is the official rails guide.
ps2. this is another link.