Rails ActionMailer problems on Mac

Question

I've been working on learning to use Rails the last couple days and I've run into something that I haven't been able to solve with Google.

So I'm just creating a basic contact form that sends an email. Everything seems to be working ok in testing, which tells me that the form is working, and ActionMailer was implemented correctly, however, I'm having trouble configuring ActionMailer. I'm running OSX 10.6.2. I have postfix running and have verified that it's running using telnet localhost 25. When I try to use the form I get a "Connection refused" error.

This is my current configuration:

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
  :address  => 'localhost',
  :port     => 25
}

I thought I might need to set :domain but I'm kind of confused on what that should be set to in this situation.

Answer 1

My life has been roughly 100x easier running :sendmail on my mac as a delivery method on my mac rather than :smtp, you might want to try giving that a shot. In this answer, I am assuming that you just want mail delivery on your Mac and don't actually care how it works.

The other thing I do, if I'm going to be connected to the net all the time on a project, is to configure my outgoing ActionMailer-originated mail to go through gmail rather than my local mac.

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
  :address        => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port           => 587,
  :domain         => "example.com",
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name  => "address@example.com",
  :password  => "secret"
}

This is for a custom domain called example.com that is set up on google apps for domains. You can also just create a gmail account and send things through there. (By changing all instances of example.com to gmail.com)

Answer 2

You need to start the postfix daemon. you can tell if your port is open by typing in a terminal

telnet localhost 25

which will try to connect to the 25 port. It wont connect if postfix isnt running, if it does, hit ctl-] to stop the connection and 'quit' to quit telnet.

If it doesn't connect, you need to start the postfix daemon:

sudo launchctl start org.postfix.master

and then try to connect with telnet. it should connect. Now you are ready to send emails from your ActionMailer class.

sudo launchctl stop org.postfix.master

stops the postfix daemon

Answer 3

I followed this guide and everything works correctly. Mainly:

sudo postfix start

then

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

Answer 4

Does it work if you substitute '127.0.0.1' for 'localhost' to see if this is an IPv4 vs. IPv6 thing or an issue with your resolver?

Answer 5

Another great way of sending and verifying mails when development is using enter link description here.

Quote from their website:

MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://localhost:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://localhost:1080 to see the mail that's arrived so far.

It intercepts mail to all recipients and hence makes it really easy to check all mail in one place.