= Action Mailer -- Easy email delivery and testing

Action Mailer is framework for designing email-service layers. These layers
are used to consolidate code for sending out forgotten passwords, welcoming
wishes on signup, invoices for billing, and any other use case that requires
a written notification to either a person or another system.

Additionally, an Action Mailer class can be used to process incoming email,
such as allowing a weblog to accept new posts from an email (which could even
have been sent from a phone).

== Sending emails

The framework works by setting up all the email details, except the body,
in methods on the service layer. Subject, recipients, sender, and timestamp
are all set up this way. An example of such a method:

  def signed_up(recipient)
    @recipients   = recipient
    @subject      = "[Signed up] Welcome #{recipient}"
    @from         = "system@loudthinking.com"
    @sent_on      = Time.local(2004, 12, 12)

    @body["recipient"] = recipient
  end

The body of the email is created by using an Action View template (regular
ERb) that has the content of the @body hash available as instance variables. 
So the corresponding body template for the method above could look like this:

  Hello there, 

  Mr. <%= @recipient %>
  
And if the recipient was given as "david@loudthinking.com", the email 
generated would look like this:

  Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0100
  From: system@loudthinking.com
  To: david@loudthinking.com
  Subject: [Signed up] Welcome david@loudthinking.com

  Hello there, 

  Mr. david@loudthinking.com

You never actually call the instance methods like signed_up directly. Instead,
you call class methods like deliver_* and create_* that are automatically
created for each instance method. So if the signed_up method sat on
ApplicationMailer, it would look like this:

  ApplicationMailer.create_signed_up("david@loudthinking.com")  # => tmail object for testing
  ApplicationMailer.deliver_signed_up("david@loudthinking.com") # sends the email
  ApplicationMailer.new.signed_up("david@loudthinking.com")     # won't work!

== Receiving emails

To receive emails, you need to implement a public instance method called receive that takes a
tmail object as its single parameter. The Action Mailer framework has a corresponding class method, 
which is also called receive, that accepts a raw, unprocessed email as a string, which it then turns
into the tmail object and calls the receive instance method.

Example:

  class Mailman < ActionMailer::Base
    def receive(email)
      page = Page.find_by_address(email.to.first)
      page.emails.create(
        :subject => email.subject, :body => email.body
      )

      if email.has_attachments?
        for attachment in email.attachments
          page.attachments.create({ 
            :file => attachment, :description => email.subject
          })
        end
      end
    end
  end

This Mailman can be the target for Postfix. In Rails, you would use the runner like this:

  ./script/runner 'Mailman.receive(STDIN.read)'


== Dependencies

Action Mailer requires that the Action Pack is either available to be required immediately
or is accessible as a GEM.


== Bundled software

* tmail 0.10.8 by Minero Aoki released under LGPL
  Read more on http://i.loveruby.net/en/prog/tmail.html

* Text::Format 0.63 by Austin Ziegler released under OpenSource
  Read more on http://www.halostatue.ca/ruby/Text__Format.html


== Download

The latest version of Action Mailer can be found at

* http://rubyforge.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=361

Documentation can be found at 

* http://actionmailer.rubyonrails.org


== Installation

You can install Action Mailer with the following command.

  % [sudo] ruby install.rb

from its distribution directory.


== License

Action Mailer is released under the MIT license.


== Support

The Action Mailer homepage is http://actionmailer.rubyonrails.org. You can find
the Action Mailer RubyForge page at http://rubyforge.org/projects/actionmailer.
And as Jim from Rake says:

   Feel free to submit commits or feature requests.  If you send a patch,
   remember to update the corresponding unit tests.  If fact, I prefer
   new feature to be submitted in the form of new unit tests.

For other information, feel free to ask on the ruby-talk mailing list (which
is mirrored to comp.lang.ruby) or contact mailto:david@loudthinking.com.