Question

I am creating an app that will be used to send emails. I don’t need to use regular mailers and view templates because I will simply be receiving the data that will be used to generate the email. However, I assume that there are some benefits to using ActionMailer instead of interacting with SMTP directly. I ran into issues while trying to instantiate a new instance of ActionMailer::Base. How can I use ActionMailer by itself without having to define a new class that extends ActionMailer::Base?

Answer 1

The underlying functionality for ActionMailer is provided by the mail gem. This allows you to send mail very simply, e.g:

Mail.deliver do
  from     '[e-mail]'
  to       '[e-mail]'
  subject  'Here is the image you wanted'
  body     File.read('body.txt')
  add_file :filename => 'somefile.png', :content => File.read('/somefile.png')
end

It supports delivery by all the same methods that ActionMailer does.