Question

I have an ActionMailer controller that’s supposed to send this file:

/user_mailer/welcome_email.text.erb

This is the (sample) content of the file:

Welcome to znood.com, <%= @user.name %>

You have successfully signed up to znood.com,
Your username is: <%= @user.email %>.

To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.

Thanks for joining and have a great day!

The Znood Team

[edited]
This is the code in the controller:

def sendmail
        @user = User.first
        UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver
        render "user_mailer/welcome_email.text"
        #render the file to see what we're supposed to send
end

and this is the code in UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base

 def welcome_email(user)
    @user = user
    @url  = "http://znood.com/"
    mail(:to => user.email, :subject => "Welcome to Znood!") 
  end

This is the email I’m receiving:

Welcometoznood.com,AbdoAchkarYouhavesuccessfullysigneduptoznood.com,Yourusernameis:blabla.Tologintothesite,justfollowthislink:http://znood.com/.Thanksforjoiningandhaveagreatday!TheZnoodTeam

Any clue how to include the spaces, carriage returns and line feeds?

[edit]
After installing the letter_opener gem, I see the following in my console:

----==_mimepart_4ea9882a2735c_1c782d964bc18193

Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:34:50 +0300

Mime-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/plain;

 charset=UTF-8

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Content-ID: <[e-mail]>



Welcometoznood.com,AbdoAchkarYouhavesuccessfullysigneduptoznood.com,Yourusername
is:blabla.Tologintothesite,justfollowthislink:http://znood.com/.Thanksforjoiningandhaveagreatday!TheZnoodTeam

I attempting changing the “Content-Transfer-Encoding” headers but they don’t seem to change. I also tried setting a default value for it. It looks like we’re stuck with 7bit encoding.

[Edited]
Another that should help us find the problem is that I tried passing the following params to the mail function in order to see whether the file renderer is problematic:

   mail(:to => user.email, :subject => "Welcome to Znood!") do |format|
        #format.text(:content_transfer_encoding => "base64")
        format.text { render :text => "Hello there!" }
    end

“Hellothere!” also came out collated.

I then tried the code below to make sure whether it’s the render or mail function that’s causing the errors.

mail(:to => user.email, :subject => "Welcome to Znood!") do |format|
        format.text { "hello there!" }
end

Also came out collated.

Answer 1

This took me a while to resolve. The problem wasn’t with ActionMailer.

If you’re having this problem, first make sure it’s not your code or gems causing this. Start a new rails application and test ActionMailer with it. (Thanks for @RubyCyanide for this suggestion)

In my case, it was a function join that I had in my String class initializer. It’s very probable that you or a gem that you’re using is conflicting with Mail’s join function.

Hope this helps!