Pony, the express way to send email in Ruby

Overview

Ruby no longer has to be jealous of PHP’s mail() function, which can send an email in a single command.

Pony.mail(:to => '[email protected]', :from => '[email protected]', :subject => 'hi', :body => 'Hello there.')
Pony.mail(:to => '[email protected]', :html_body => '<h1>Hello there!</h1>', :body => "In case you can't read html, Hello there.")
Pony.mail(:to => '[email protected]', :cc => '[email protected]', :from => '[email protected]', :subject => 'hi', :body => 'Howsit!')

Any option key may be omitted except for :to. For a complete list of options, see List Of Options section below.

Transport

Pony uses /usr/sbin/sendmail to send mail if it is available, otherwise it uses SMTP to localhost.

This can be over-ridden if you specify a via option:

Pony.mail(:to => '[email protected]', :via => :smtp) # sends via SMTP

Pony.mail(:to => '[email protected]', :via => :sendmail) # sends via sendmail

You can also specify options for SMTP:

Pony.mail({
  :to => '[email protected]',
  :via => :smtp,
  :via_options => {
    :address        => 'smtp.yourserver.com',
    :port           => '25',
    :user_name      => 'user',
    :password       => 'password',
    :authentication => :plain, # :plain, :login, :cram_md5, no auth by default
    :domain         => "localhost.localdomain" # the HELO domain provided by the client to the server
  }
})

Gmail example (with TLS/SSL)

Pony.mail({
  :to => '[email protected]',
  :via => :smtp,
  :via_options => {
    :address              => 'smtp.gmail.com',
    :port                 => '587',
    :enable_starttls_auto => true,
    :user_name            => 'user',
    :password             => 'password',
    :authentication       => :plain, # :plain, :login, :cram_md5, no auth by default
    :domain               => "localhost.localdomain" # the HELO domain provided by the client to the server
  }
})

And options for Sendmail:

Pony.mail({
  :to => '[email protected]',
  :via => :sendmail,
  :via_options => {
    :location  => '/path/to/sendmail', # defaults to 'which sendmail' or '/usr/sbin/sendmail' if 'which' fails
    :arguments => '-t' # -t and -i are the defaults
  }
})

If you’re using ssmtp, set :arguments => ''.

Attachments

You can attach a file or two with the :attachments option:

Pony.mail(..., :attachments => {"foo.zip" => File.read("path/to/foo.zip"), "hello.txt" => "hello!"})

Note: An attachment’s mime-type is set based on the filename (as dictated by the ruby gem mime-types). So ‘foo.pdf’ has a mime-type of ‘application/pdf’

Custom Headers

Pony allows you to specify custom mail headers

Pony.mail(
  :to => '[email protected]',
  :headers => { "List-ID" => "...", "X-My-Custom-Header" => "what a cool custom header" }
)

Add additional options for headers in each part of letter (text, html)

Pony.mail(
  :body => 'test',
  :html_body => 'What do you know, Joe?',
  :attachments => {"foo.txt" => "content of foo.txt"},
  :body_part_header => { content_disposition: "inline" }
)

This will add option ‘Content-Disposition: inline’ for text part header of letter.

Also you can add additional options for html part of latter, e.g.:

:html_body_part_header => { content_disposition: "inline" }

List Of Options

Options passed pretty much directly to Mail

to
cc
bcc
from
body # the plain text body
html_body # for sending html-formatted email
subject
content_type
charset # In case you need to send in utf-8 or similar
text_part_charset # for multipart messages, set the charset of the text part
attachments # see Attachments section above
headers # see Custom headers section above
body_part_header # see Custom headers section above
html_body_part_header # see Custom headers section above
message_id
sender  # Sets "envelope from" (and the Sender header)
reply_to
smtp_envelope_to

Other options

via # :smtp or :sendmail, see Transport section above
via_options # specify transport options, see Transport section above

Set default options

Default options can be set so that they don’t have to be repeated. The default options you set will be overriden by any options you pass in to Pony.mail()

Pony.options = { :from => '[email protected]', :via => :smtp, :via_options => { :host => 'smtp.yourserver.com' } }
Pony.mail(:to => 'foo@bar') # Sends mail to foo@bar from [email protected] using smtp
Pony.mail(:from => '[email protected]', :to => 'foo@bar') # Sends mail to foo@bar from [email protected] using smtp

Help

If you need help using Pony, or it looks like you’ve found a bug, email [email protected]. The full forum is groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ponyrb

External Dependencies

mail > 2.0

Note: these requirements are specified in the gemspec as well. Also, you may need smtp_tls if you want to send via tls/ssl and are using ruby < 1.8.7

Meta

Maintained by Ben Prew

Written by Adam Wiggins

Patches contributed by: Arun Thampi, Hiroshi Saito, Jesse Cooke, Mathieu Martin, Neil Mock, Nickolas Means, Othmane Benkirane, Rick Olson Stephen Celis, Thomas Hurst, Kalin Harvey Carl Hörberg

Released under the MIT License: www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

homepage: github.com/benprew/pony mailing list: [email protected]

Releases

1.8

  • Add additional options for headers in each part of letter

1.7

  • Better default content_type with attachments

1.6

  • Unknown options are passed directly to mail to handle. Remove deprecated syntax

1.5.1

  • Loosen mail dependency to >= 2.0 instead of > 2.0

1.5

  • Specify content-id of attachments as filename@hostname

1.4.1

  • Update gemfile

1.4

  • Updated docs

1.3

  • Add new option :text_part_charset, which allows you to specify the charset for the text portion

1.2

  • Remove limitations on :via, and let mail handle it (this means you can say things like :via => test)

  • Add reply-to option and a bundler file

1.1

  • Add default options

1.0

  • Convert to using Mail as the mail-generation backend, instead of TMail

0.9.1

  • provide the ability to set custom mail headers with something like:

Pony.mail(:headers => => “…”)

  • provide the ability to set the Message-Id from Pony.mail

0.9

  • merge in kalin’s fixes to use tmail.destinations instead of trying to parse tmail.to, tmail.cc and tmail.bcc. New specs to test functionality

0.8

  • Fix bug that was allowing nil :bcc and :cc options to be passed to smtp

0.7

  • Pass :cc and :bcc options to sendmail appropriately

0.6

  • Add :bcc capability

  • Add :charset capability

  • Add complete list of options to readme

  • fix bug: readme examples

0.5

  • default location of sendmail to /usr/sbin/sendmail if sendmail not in path

  • fix bug: README not showing password option (listed as pass)

0.4.1

  • Add :cc capability

  • fix bug: resolve body not displaying when attachments sent

0.4

  • Implemented file attachments option

  • use TLS if :tls => true