Mon Mar 26 14:17:00 UTC 2007

Sending Email with Ruby

Posted in Ruby at 02:17 PM by mohits

I know that there are a number of guides online that provide the basic source for sending email using Ruby but I found that the basic sample code was lacking in one major respect – it did not set the date on the outgoing email. That meant that there was no specific “sent time” for the email and its treatment would depend on the email client. For example, Thunderbird would mark it with the date/ time at which it was downloaded.

The solution to this problem is really quite simple – you just need to format and print the date into the message as shown below.

  
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require 'net/smtp'

#Senders and Recipients
from_name = 'My Name'
from_mail = 'me@mydomain.com'
to_name = 'My Friend'
to_mail = 'them@theirdomain.com'

#Servers and Authentication
smtp_host   = 'mail.mydomain.com'
smtp_port   = 25
smtp_domain = 'mydomain.com'
smtp_user   = 'user@mydomain.com'
smtp_pwd    = 'secure_password'

#The subject and the message
t = Time.now
subj = 'Sending Email with Ruby'
msg_body = "Check out the instructions on how to send mail using Ruby.\n"

#The date/time should look something like: Thu, 03 Jan 2006 12:33:22 -0700
msg_date = t.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0800")

#Compose the message for the email
msg = <<END_OF_MESSAGE
Date: #{msg_date}
From: #{from_name} <#{from_mail}>
To: #{to_name} <#{to_mail}>
Subject: #{subj}
  
#{msg_body}
END_OF_MESSAGE

Net::SMTP.start(smtp_host, smtp_port, smtp_domain, smtp_user, smtp_pwd, :plain) do |smtp|
  smtp.send_message msg, smtp_user, to_mail
end

And that’s all there is to it!

TODO: Need to make the time printing more generic – right now, it’s kinda hard-coded to my time zone.

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