Richard Huang's Website

multiple_mailers - send emails by different smtp accounts

I use gmail to send email notifications on my website, it's really easy to build based on actionmailer

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => 'smtp.gmail.com',
  :port => 587,
  :domain => 'railsbp.com',
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name => 'notification@railsbp.com',
  :password => 'password'
}

But I found it does not allow to setup 2 different smtp accounts, e.g. I want to send notification email with notification@railsbp.com and send exception notifier email with exception.notifier@railsbp.com, after googling, I hacked my mailer classes with

class NotificationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  if Rails.env.production?
    class <<self
      def smtp_settings
        options = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root}/config/mailers.yml")[Rails.env]['exception_notifier']
        @@smtp_settings = {
          :address              => options["address"],
          :port                 => options["port"],
          :domain               => options["domain"],
          :authentication       => options["authentication"],
          :user_name            => options["user_name"],
          :password             => options["password"]
        }
      end
    end
  end
end

then add a new config file config/mailers.yml

production:
  common: &common
    address: 'smtp.gmail.com'
    port: 587
    domain: 'rails-bestpractices.com'
    authentication: 'plain'

  notification:
    <<: *common
    user_name: 'notification@rails-bestpractices.com'
    password: 'password'

  exception.notifier:
    <<: *common
    user_name: 'exception.notifier@rails-bestpractices.com'
    password: 'password'

that allows me to setup one smtp account per actionmailer class, keep in mind that you should only hack smtp_settings for what environment you really want to send emails (here is production), if you don't check Rails.env, it will send email even in development and test environments.

Now it works fine, I can send emails by as many smtp accounts as I like, but it looks ugly, I don't like hacking codes all over my mailer classes. So I abstract it to a new gem multiple_mailers, like the hack above, you should define config file config/mailers.yml and for each mail class, what you only need is to declare its mailer account name

class NotificationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  mailer_account "notification"
end

class ExceptionNotifier
  class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
    mailer_account "exception.notifier"
  end
end