YouTipRuby Sending Email
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a set of rules for transferring emails from a source address to a destination address, controlling the way messages are relayed.
Ruby provides `Net::SMTP` for sending emails and offers two methods: `new` and `start`.
The **`new`** method has two parameters:
* _server name_ defaults to `localhost`
* _port number_ defaults to `25`
The **`start`** method has the following parameters:
* _server_ - SMTP server IP, defaults to `localhost`
* _port_ - port number, defaults to `25`
* _domain_ - sender's domain, defaults to `ENV`
* _account_ - username, defaults to `nil`
* _password_ - user password, defaults to `nil`
* _authtype_ - authentication type, defaults to `_cram_md5_`
The SMTP object instantiation method calls `sendmail` with the following parameters:
* _source_ - a string, array, or anything returned by an iterator at any time.
* _sender_ - a string that appears in the email's form fields.
* _recipients_ - a string or array of strings representing the recipient addresses.
### Example
The following provides a simple Ruby script to send an email:
## Example
```ruby
require 'net/smtp'
message = <<MESSAGE_END
From: Private Person
To: A Test User
Subject: SMTP e-mail test
This is a test e-mail message.
MESSAGE_END
Net::SMTP.start('localhost') do |smtp|
smtp.send_message message, 'me@fromdomain.com', 'test@todomain.com'
end
In the above example, you have set up a basic email message. Note the correct header format. An email requires From, To, and Subject headers, with a blank line separating the headers from the text content.
The code uses `Net::SMTP` to connect to the SMTP server on the local machine and the `send_message` method to send the email, with parameters for the sender's and recipient's email addresses.
If you don't have an SMTP server running on your local machine, you can use `Net::SMTP` to communicate with a remote SMTP server. If you are using a webmail service (like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail), your email provider will give you the details for the outgoing mail server:
```ruby
Net::SMTP.start('mail.your-domain.com')
The above code will connect to the mail server at host `mail.your-domain.com` on port `25`. If a username and password are required, the code would be:
```ruby
Net::SMTP.start('mail.your-domain.com', 25, 'localhost', 'username', 'password', :plain)
The above example uses the specified username and password to connect to the mail server at host `mail.your-domain.com` on port `25`.
* * *
## Sending HTML Email with Ruby
`Net::SMTP` also supports sending emails in HTML format.
When sending an email, you can set the MIME version, document type, and character set to send an HTML-formatted email.
### Example
The following example sends an email in HTML format:
## Example
```ruby
require 'net/smtp'
message = <<MESSAGE_END
From: Private Person
To: A Test User
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
Subject: SMTP e-mail test
This is an e-mail message to be sent in HTML format
This is HTML message.