Pony, the express way to send email in Ruby¶ ↑

Overview¶ ↑

Ruby no longer has to be jealous of PHP’s mail() function, which can send an email in a single command.

Pony.mail(:to => 'you@example.com', :from => 'me@example.com', :subject => 'hi', :body => 'Hello there.')
Pony.mail(:to => 'you@example.com', :html_body => '<h1>Hello there!</h1>', :body => "In case you can't read html, Hello there.")
Pony.mail(:to => 'you@example.com', :cc => 'him@example.com', :from => 'me@example.com', :subject => 'hi', :body => 'Howsit!')

Any option key may be omitted except for :to. For a complete list of options, see List Of Options section below.

Transport¶ ↑

Pony uses /usr/sbin/sendmail to send mail if it is available, otherwise it uses SMTP to localhost.

This can be over-ridden if you specify a via option:

Pony.mail(:to => 'you@example.com', :via => :smtp) # sends via SMTP

Pony.mail(:to => 'you@example.com', :via => :sendmail) # sends via sendmail

You can also specify options for SMTP:

Pony.mail({
  :to => 'you@example.com',
  :via => :smtp,
  :via_options => {
    :address        => 'smtp.yourserver.com',
    :port           => '25',
    :user_name      => 'user',
    :password       => 'password',
    :authentication => :plain, # :plain, :login, :cram_md5, no auth by default
    :domain         => "localhost.localdomain" # the HELO domain provided by the client to the server
  }
})

Gmail example (with TLS/SSL)

Pony.mail({
  :to => 'you@example.com',
  :via => :smtp,
  :via_options => {
    :address              => 'smtp.gmail.com',
    :port                 => '587',
    :enable_starttls_auto => true,
    :user_name            => 'user',
    :password             => 'password',
    :authentication       => :plain, # :plain, :login, :cram_md5, no auth by default
    :domain               => "localhost.localdomain" # the HELO domain provided by the client to the server
  }
})

And options for Sendmail:

Pony.mail({
  :to => 'you@example.com',
  :via => :sendmail,
  :via_options => {
    :location  => '/path/to/sendmail', # defaults to 'which sendmail' or '/usr/sbin/sendmail' if 'which' fails
    :arguments => '-t' # -t and -i are the defaults
  }
})

If you’re using ssmtp, set :arguments => ''.

Attachments¶ ↑

You can attach a file or two with the :attachments option:

Pony.mail(..., :attachments => {"foo.zip" => File.read("path/to/foo.zip"), "hello.txt" => "hello!"})

Note: An attachment’s mime-type is set based on the filename (as dictated by the ruby gem mime-types). So ‘foo.pdf’ has a mime-type of ‘application/pdf’

Custom Headers¶ ↑

Pony allows you to specify custom mail headers

Pony.mail(
  :to => 'me@example.com',
  :headers => { "List-ID" => "...", "X-My-Custom-Header" => "what a cool custom header" }
)

List Of Options¶ ↑

Options passed pretty much directly to Mail

to
cc
bcc
from
body # the plain text body
html_body # for sending html-formatted email
subject
charset # In case you need to send in utf-8 or similar
text_part_charset # for multipart messages, set the charset of the text part
attachments # see Attachments section above
headers # see Custom headers section above
message_id
sender  # Sets "envelope from" (and the Sender header)
reply_to

Other options

via # :smtp or :sendmail, see Transport section above
via_options # specify transport options, see Transport section above

Set default options¶ ↑

Default options can be set so that they don’t have to be repeated. The default options you set will be overriden by any options you pass in to Pony.mail()

Pony.options = { :from => 'noreply@example.com', :via => :smtp, :via_options => { :host => 'smtp.yourserver.com' } }
Pony.mail(:to => 'foo@bar') # Sends mail to foo@bar from noreply@example.com using smtp
Pony.mail(:from => 'pony@example.com', :to => 'foo@bar') # Sends mail to foo@bar from pony@example.com using smtp

Help¶ ↑

If you need help using Pony, or it looks like you’ve found a bug, we have a google group setup at: ponyrb@googlegroups.com.

External Dependencies¶ ↑

mail > 2.0

Note: these requirements are specified in the gemspec as well. Also, you may need smtp_tls if you want to send via tls/ssl and are using ruby < 1.8.7

Meta¶ ↑

Maintained by Ben Prew

Written by Adam Wiggins

Patches contributed by: Arun Thampi, Hiroshi Saito, Jesse Cooke, Mathieu Martin, Neil Mock, Nickolas Means, Othmane Benkirane, Rick Olson Stephen Celis, Thomas Hurst, Kalin Harvey Carl Hörberg

Released under the MIT License: www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

homepage: github.com/benprew/pony mailing list: ponyrb@googlegroups.com

Releases¶ ↑

1.5

• Specify content-id of attachments as filename@hostname

1.4.1

• Update gemfile

1.4

• Updated docs

1.3

• Add new option :text_part_charset, which allows you to specify the charset for the text portion

1.2

• Remove limitations on :via, and let mail handle it (this means you can say things like :via => test)

• Add reply-to option and a bundler file

1.1

• Add default options

1.0

• Convert to using Mail as the mail-generation backend, instead of TMail

0.9.1

• provide the ability to set custom mail headers with something like:

Pony.mail(:headers => {“List-ID” => “…”})

• provide the ability to set the Message-Id from Pony.mail

0.9

• merge in kalin’s fixes to use tmail.destinations instead of trying to parse tmail.to, tmail.cc and tmail.bcc. New specs to test functionality

0.8

• Fix bug that was allowing nil :bcc and :cc options to be passed to smtp

0.7

• Pass :cc and :bcc options to sendmail appropriately

0.6

• Add :bcc capability

• Add :charset capability

• Add complete list of options to readme

• fix bug: readme examples

0.5

• default location of sendmail to /usr/sbin/sendmail if sendmail not in path

• fix bug: README not showing password option (listed as pass)

0.4.1

• Add :cc capability

• fix bug: resolve body not displaying when attachments sent

0.4

• Implemented file attachments option

• use TLS if :tls => true