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Sending Emails in Rails with Action Mailer and Gmail

Felice Forby on May 19, 2019

In this post, I will be setting up a mailer in Rails that will send out an email to the website owner when a customer submits an order. (I was usin...

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pethl • Jul 9

Just so helpful and clear - thanks very much for putting this together and sharing it

Felice Forby • Jul 16

Thanks! This article is a little old but hopefully it still works in newer Rails versions :)

Derrick Amenuve • Nov 9 '20

thank you for writing this detailed tutorial.

matthewchao • Aug 1 '20

I just wanted to thank you for writing out this detailed tutorial. I'm going through the Rails Tutorial (which uses SendGrid) but was able to get everything working with Gmail thanks to your instructions. It was kind of hard finding recent, still-accurate information!

Amit Patel • Feb 17 '20

If you don't use 2-step verification, you will have to allow your account to be accessed by "less secure apps". In your Google settings under the "Security" tab, look for the "Less secure app access" section and click "Turn on access".

If this is not done, google will block you and mail won't be delivered. You may get Net::SMTPAuthenticationError: 535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted error

Also google may block you.

Felice Forby • Feb 21 '20

Honestly, I ended up running into problems even after allowing "Less secure app access" (it just stopped sending emails) so I definitely recommend using the two-factor authentication!

Damon Bauer • Jan 6 '22

Felice -

This is such a nice post. Thanks for taking the time to break things down like you did. I'd never built a mailer in Rails, but following your post I was able to with no problems at all.

Keep up the great work!

J. Mark Locklear • Apr 22 '21

Rather than "allowing less secure apps" in gmail you can create a specific app password: support.google.com/accounts/answer...

Robert Reiz • Aug 22 '21

Thanks man! That helped me to make it work!

Mahan Mashoof • Aug 15 '20 • Edited

Thanks a lot, the 2-step method really helped!
*just need to restart the server for it to actually work (rails s)

FITZ PATRICK • Nov 11 '22

Hi there,
Thank you very much for the great tutorial.
On Docker in dev mode I had this error:
OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError (SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 peeraddr=172.253.122.108:587 state=error: certificate verify failed (self signed certificate in certificate chain))
To fix it I added to config.action_mailer.smtp_settings:
:enable_starttls_auto => true
Maybe it will help out someone
Cheers

Sara Sabet • Nov 1 '21

Hi, I'm following this article to setup mailer, and get the following error ==>
Template is missing
Missing template event_mailer/new_event_request_email with "mailer". Searched in: * "event_mailer"
would you be able taking a look on it ? Do u have any idea why I'm getting this error ?

Michael Lee 🍕 • Aug 30 '19

This was very helpful @morinoko! Thank you so much for writing this article.

Felice Forby • Aug 30 '19

Thanks for your comment, Michael! I'm glad the article helped :D

asolab • Sep 22 '22

I'm having a issue with my action mailer functionalities, it works fine with open letter gem but with smtp config token only run on my terminal it won’t deliver to mail, 421 server too busy error.
stackoverflow.com/questions/737354...

r-osoriobarra • Dec 15 '21

Thank you bro!!!, you saved me in a part of my project. We were with my colleagues stuck in this part. Very good article. You are awesome!

Mithun Nair • Feb 22 '21 • Edited

Hi Felice, This is a great tutorial and it help me setup and use Action Mailer. Thank you. One question.
When I used Gmails SMTP server i.e "smtp.gmail.com", everything worked fine for me. But when I tried using a different SMTP server i.e a service called sendinblue.com/ whose SMTP server is "smtp-relay.sendinblue.com", the SMTP server returns a 501 which essentially means sender address syntax is bad. After some investigation I discovered that the reason was the sender address should be in "<>" . Oddly enough, in another part of my app where I use Devise Gem, the mail confirmation for registering a new user works fine with this SMTP server and without the <>. So the SMTP configuration and mailer is perfectly fine. Its only when I explicitly call the Action Mailer with this particular SMTP server that it fails. As I mentioned above, the mailer works fine with Gmail SMTP server also.
Any thoughts on this?

Élisson Michael • Jan 18 '21

Thanks for sharing this.

John Pitchko • Jul 25 '23

Worked great; just what I needed; thank you!

Muhammad Ahmad • Aug 18 '23

Thanks for this wonderful article

Rodrigo Pimentel Sátyro Xita • Mar 25 '21

Thank you very much :D! helped me a lot!

Mathieu EUSTACHY • Jul 22 '21

Thanks @morinoko for this article, it was thoroughly explained, and it still works in July 2021!
I used 2-step verification + app password method and it worked on the first try ;)