I have been having troubles sending e-mails using ActionMailer on windows. The simple code-sample: [ruby] my_filename="my_image.jpeg" attachment "image/jpeg" do |a| a.body = File.read(my_filename) a.filename = File.basename(my_filename) end [/ruby] did not work. I did find an attachment inside my e-mail, but it was corrupt. It took me a while to figure out it could be something related to my development platform, which unfortunately still is windows (not for long). On windows reading binary files is less obvious, apparently, so you need to write: [ruby] my_filename="my_image.jpeg" attachment "image/jpeg" do |a| a.body = File.open(my_filename,'rb') { |f| f.read} a.filename = File.basename(my_filename) end [/ruby] ... and this will work! :) I you have to combine normal e-mail content and one or more attachments, this then becomes something like: [ruby] # we send a mail to respond to a mention def mention_response(given_subject, addressee, pdf_attachment = nil) from APP_CONFIG["mail"]["from"] recipients addressee.to_a subject given_subject content_type "multipart/mixed" part "text/html" do |p| p.body = render_message("mention_response", :thr_name => thr_name) end attachment :content_type => "application/doc" do |a| a.filename File.basename(pdf_attachment) a.body File.open(pdf_attachment, "rb") { |f| f.read } end unless pdf_attachment.nil? end [/ruby] Nice :)

I installed and configured exception notifier to be notified of any unexpected errors in our production environment. At first i tried this out in development, used gmail as my smtp server and all was working fine. My action mailer configuration looked as follows, in environment.rb: [ruby] # configure mailing config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { :enable_starttls_auto => true, :address => "smtp.gmail.com", :port => "587", :domain => "localhost", :authentication => :plain, :user_name => "<snipped>", :password => "<snipped>" } ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(bla@my_clients_domain.com) ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %("<snipped>@gmail.com") ExceptionNotifier.email_prefix = "[My Application ERROR] " [/ruby] Using this configuration worked, and i received the e-mails. Alas, as usual, on my client's production server the port to reach gmail was blocked, and when i asked to open it, they instead proposed to use their own smtp-server. So i changed the configuration as follows: [ruby] config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = { :address => "192.168.0.10", :port => "25", :domain => "production-domain.be", :authentication => nil } ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(bla@my_clients_domain.com) ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %("info@production-domain.com") ExceptionNotifier.email_prefix = "[My Application ERROR] " [/ruby] The first thing i did wrong was the domain-name. At first i wrote "@production-domain.be" in my action-mailer configuration, so my HELO request was blocked. Secondly, apparently, because i wrote ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %("info@production-domain.com") the sender address was not recognised and the mail was rejected by our own SMTP-server. This took me a while to figure out. Luckily our sys-admin noticed the difference. The fix: [ruby] ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %(info@production-domain.com) [/ruby] And now i know for sure that if i get no mails, my application really is working :)