micahwedemeyer / mailcar

Mailcar
=======

Mailcar 0.1

Mailcar is a dead-simple (ie. not many features) bulk emailer for Ruby on Rails, using ActiveRecord
and ActionMailer.

If you need to send emails to your entire user base and don't want to pay the high prices that most
mass email services charge, then this is the plugin for you!

WARNING!!! Using this without having your SMTP server set up correctly could land your server on
hundreds of blacklists.  If that prospects scares you, look at the pay-to-send bulk emailers.  It's
expensive, but at least you know you're safe.

WARNING!!! As is, this script is tied tightly to the codebase I wrote it for.  It will not work out
of the box.  I'm posting it in the hopes that someone else needs something similar and doesn't want to
start from scratch.  Please send me patches or pull requests with your upgrades and I'll include them
and add you to the credits.

Installation
============
To copy the models and create the migration, run:

script/generate mailcar all

Then execute the migration:

rake db:migrate


Example
=======

To send a new bulk email, you must first create the message body file.  I use Thunderbird to create an
HTML email, then save it out as HTML.

At that point, you can create the message and send it as follows:

rake mailcar:new_message FROM='me@mydomain.com' SUBJECT='New features on the site' BODY_FILE=/path/to/email/body
rake mailcar:prep_for_send MESSAGE_ID=99
rake mailcar:send MESSAGE_ID=99

If the sending process is ever interrupted, you can resume it with another call to send.


TODO
====
* Add a test suite (wish I knew more about plugin testing...)
* Make it easy to give a block (or something) to generate the list of email addresses
* Pass emails through ERB to allow for templating / dynamic emails
* Add support for multipart emails
* Add a cleanup task to remove old messages
* Make sending delay configurable


Copyright (c) 2009 [Micah Wedemeyer], released under the MIT license