Send real mail with Rails from your development environment (on Mac OS X)
Jun
17

So I wanted to send real emails from my Rails application, on the development environment. Awesomely, Mac OS X comes with a preinstalled Postfix which we can use as an outgoing SMTP server. It’s stupidly simple:

Start the SMTP server
It’s as easy as this:


  
sudo postfix start




To see if it’s running a’right, run the following command and you should see a similar output to mine:



  
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$ nc localhost 25
220 aca80064.ipt.aol.com ESMTP Postfix




If that happens, you are almost done. Run the following command to send a test message:



  

  
date | mail -s test your.name@gmail.com




In my case, it went to my Gmail Spam folder so I just this-is-not-spam-ed it.


Configure your Rails application

Add this code to your config/environments/development.rb file:



  
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config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "localhost",
  :port => 25,
  :domain => "whatever.com",
}




And that’s it. Now every email you send from a Notifier will truly get to your inbox.