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' # this defaults to 'which sendmail' or '/usr/sbin/sendmail' if 'which' fails
  :arguments => '-t' # -t and -i are the defaults
}

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