ar_mailer (with priority queue)

Ar_mailer is a gem that implements an email queue for Ruby on Rails in a transparent way. After changing one setting, all of the usual ‘deliver_xyz’ mailer methods will, instead of actually sending out an email, create a new row in the ‘emails’ table which is used as the queue. A separate daemon checks that table periodically and does the actual delivery. This can greatly speed up the response time of Rails actions that are locked for a long time by the process of sending out large emails.

This project was forked from:

github.com/adzap/ar_mailer

Which was forked from:

rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb

It adds one additional feature to ar_mailer - the ability to prioritize emails, so that for example newsletter sending out doesn’t block the sending out of more time-critical email messages.

For general ar_mailer setup instructions see the original sources:

github.com/adzap/ar_mailer

rubyforge.org/projects/seattlerb

Installing ar_mailer

There is a gem you have to install instead of the usual ar_mailer:

$ sudo gem uninstall ar_mailer
$ sudo gem install rzeszotko-ar_mailer

Then in environment.rb you have to do:

config.gem "rzeszotko-ar_mailer"

You may also need to do an additonal require:

require 'rzeszotko-ar_mailer'

Usage

The difference from regular ar_mailer is in that you can specify a priority for a given email:

class Emails < ActionMailer::Base
  def newsletter(newsletter, users)
    from           "John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>"
    recipients     users.collect(&:email)
    sent_on        Time.now
    subject        newsletter.subject
    priority       100
    body           :newsletter => newsletter
  end
end

Emails with lower priority are send out first, and the default priority (when you do not specify one explicitly) is 0.