Finally managed to work this out, what follows is something that does 100% work!
Install your Mail Client
Choose which one you're gonna use, SendMail or the more powerful Postfix;
sudo aptitude install sendmail
..or
sudo aptitude install postfix
...however, for this example I'm going to be using the easier Sendmail.
Create your Mailer Model
First things first, your gonna need a mailer model, so to create one go to the root of your rails app and type...
script/generate mailer UserMailer
This will generate a couple of new directories but more importantly thru the magic of rails by using 'mailer' it will know that your creating a model that will use the ActionMailer library and so things will be handled differently with this one than other models.
Setup Rails to use SendMail
Now we could use SMTP to send emails from our web app, but to be perfectly honest that's like a major headache for the newbie to setup. So as long as your running this on a linux box you can use the more simpler SendMail libaries to send email.
To use these in production, edit your production.rb environment file...
myapp/config/environments/production.rb
and add these lines...
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :sendmail
ActionMailer::Base.sendmail_settings = {
:location => '/usr/sbin/sendmail',
:arguments => '-i -t'
}
What the first line will do is notify you of any delivery errors, useful in testing, you can turn this off in production by setting it to false.
:location tells the actionmailer where to find the sendmail libraries, default location.
:arguments tell sendmail to send the email immediately, rather than wait, so your email does get sent.
That's that done, remember you could use SMTP but it can be a nightmare to setup installing postfix, setting your MX records etc. this however is simple & quick.
Back to our UserMailer model
Now that's all sorted, open your UserMailer model...
myapp/app/models/user_mailer.rb
And add...
def test
recipients "user@destination.com"
from "admin@source.com"
subject "Thank you for Registering"
body "test email"
end
What we've done is created a method that will email user@destination.com when it get's called.
Which can be done by using...
User_Mailer.deliver_test
...anywhere in our app's code.
Notice the deliver_ prefix in front of our method test. This is how we associate our 'magic' ActionMailer methods associated when we generated the model.
Further Reading
You can optionally expand this with the examples below, but hopefully the above has helped you get over one of the major headaches of Ruby on Rails.
