#313 Receiving Email with Mailman pro

This is quite interesting. Can you do a similar screencast for handling incoming faxes and then routing them appropriately?
Thanks.
Bharat

You can skip require "rubygems" since Ruby 1.9

I've been working on email marketing for a while now and I have to say that Gmail is the 1st email client that I use to test my emails, but then I have to test in the painful Outlooks... because the majority of clients uses Outlook (Link).

Making emails "work" in Outlook 2007 & 2010 (Windows versions) is painful, because M$ switched the render engine from IE to Word (join your voice at Link) and the Word engine doesn't follow some web standards, so be ready for some headaches.

Important lessons:
* be careful when sending a lot of emails, your email address can get blacklisted very fast
* use several email clients to test your emails
* forget CSS positions
* use a spam tester, to test your email's spam value
* add an unsubscribe link to your email, because it's mandatory (SPAM-CAN laws)
* ...

Some useful resources:
Link
Link

You want to be careful rescuing Exception as it catches things like Ctrl-C and other signals. This is because For example:

$ ruby -e "begin; sleep(9999); rescue Exception => e; puts 'ignoring ' + e.class.name; retry; end"

Try pressing Ctrl-C or killing the PID. It really sucks having to kill -9 because the killer never knows if they're causing some sort of state corruption.

I recommend rescuing from StandardError and possibly Timeout::Error if you are hitting some external service. Another option is to do something like this:

begin
  #  ...
rescue SignalException
  raise
rescue Exception => e
  # as before
end

any tips for using this on Heroku?

Would it be difficult to configure the server to start with foreman rather then a script?

HI Ryan, I've noticed that you have used a few environment variables in the recent episodes. Do you have any opinions on how best ways of setting them? IE - one config file vs in each environment file? Maybe this could be a short episode on how environment variables work and boot sequences?

Thanks!

Any tips on daemonizing this thing?

Any ideas on how to use multiple pop3 mailboxes for polling?

Any advantages of Mailman over Activemailer?

How would you handle having different configurations? Let's say a User logs into the system. Under their Account Settings, they can put in their pop/smtp settings and then use ActionMailer and MailMan with those settings vs having one configured for global use. One of the reasons why I ask is because the SendMail app within linux keeps getting flagged as spam and/or never reaches it's destination. However, this doesn't happen when using a SMTP server. I know that this is a bit off topic in general.

I'd love to see a take on this that removes Mailman from the equation and handles emails that are "delivered" to the app via a POST request (a la Sendgrid's Post API).

can anybody please help me. how to configure mailman on production.
should i need to keep my production terminal allways open after typing script/mailman_server.rb

I've tried setting up the maildir access (using postfix as my email server), but am having permission problems. The mailman script can't access the maildir messages. If I chmod the maildir, the new messages that get written aren't chmodded, so that doesn't work.

Any ideas on a workaround?

I tried to use the Daemon gem to run the mailman_server in the background. However, I cannot get it to recognize the rails environment, so I cannot access my models from the mailman_server.

The only way I can get it to run in the background is using:
nohup ./script/mailman_server &

But because there are no start and stop commands, it is difficult to implement in a deployment strategy.

Next try: God to manage the mailman_server

Hey all. After watching this episode I integrated Mailman into one of our apps. I had to deal with many of the issues described above like daemonizing, testing and so on. I've put together a guide at

http://dansowter.com/mailman-guide/

Hope it helps someone.

Dan

I'm following along with this and I am having an odd issue that I cant figure out when saving the ticket to the database. Instead of it writing the To or From field as just the email address, its writing it in the form of "--- !seq:Mail::AddressContainer - email@address"

Anyone else ran into this?

Has anyone else had issues and found a resolution when using Outlook or any kind of multipart/HTML email and have it format nicely. How did you handle email signatures with images?

Hello! I don't have Railscasts Pro, so I havent't seen the episode, but thought you guys might find this useful:

https://github.com/johncant/mailman-rails

It's a fairly basic Rails integration Gem for Mailman. It makes it easier to define your email router across your application, for instance from mailers or models. It also includes some rake tasks for daemonization which solves some of the problems mentioned in these comments.

I'm having problems to show the tickets after pop3 ativation.

Encoding::CompatibilityError in Tickets#index

Showing /home/caio/RubymineProjects/tickets/app/views/tickets/index.html.erb where line #17 raised:

incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT
Extracted source (around line #17):

14:
15: <%= ticket.Subject %>
16: <%= ticket.From %>
17: <%= ticket.Body %>
18: <%= link_to 'Show', ticket %>
19: <%= link_to 'Edit', edit_ticket_path(ticket) %>
20: <%= link_to 'Destroy', ticket, method: :delete, data: { confirm: 'Are you sure?' } %>
Rails.root: /home/caio/RubymineProjects/tickets

Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace
app/views/tickets/index.html.erb:17:in block in _app_views_tickets_index_html_erb___2407065071369385486_24584740'
app/views/tickets/index.html.erb:13:ineach'
app/views/tickets/index.html.erb:13:in _app_views_tickets_index_html_erb___2407065071369385486_24584740'
app/controllers/tickets_controller.rb:7:inindex'

I'm googling a lot but I've found nothing...

I tried to decouple the receiving of a ticket from the further processing using observers.

For that I added an observer to tickets:

class TicketObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
  def after_create(ticket)
   puts ticket.from
        end
end

This works fine when adding a new ticket through the browser. However when I send an email to my application I'll get the following exception:

E, [2013-03-19T20:19:50.352625 #8296] ERROR -- : uninitialized constant Ticket
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/inflector/methods.rb:230:in block in constantize'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/inflector/methods.rb:229:ineach'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/inflector/methods.rb:229:in constantize'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb:54:inconstantize'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:210:in observed_class'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:203:inobserved_classes'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:223:in observed_classes'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activerecord-3.2.12/lib/active_record/observer.rb:96:inobserved_classes'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:219:in initialize'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/singleton.rb:141:innew'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/singleton.rb:141:in block in instance'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/singleton.rb:139:insynchronize'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/singleton.rb:139:in instance'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:86:ininstantiate_observer'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:59:in block in instantiate_observers'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:59:ineach'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activemodel-3.2.12/lib/active_model/observing.rb:59:in instantiate_observers'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activerecord-3.2.12/lib/active_record/railtie.rb:117:inblock (2 levels) in class:Railtie'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/lazy_load_hooks.rb:36:in instance_eval'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/lazy_load_hooks.rb:36:inexecute_hook'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/lazy_load_hooks.rb:43:in block in run_load_hooks'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/lazy_load_hooks.rb:42:ineach'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activesupport-3.2.12/lib/active_support/lazy_load_hooks.rb:42:in run_load_hooks'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/activerecord-3.2.12/lib/active_record/base.rb:720:in'
/Users/tummam/Documents/Rails/ticketing/app/models/ticket.rb:1:in <top (required)>'
script/mailman_server:19:inblock (2 levels) in '
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/router.rb:66:in instance_exec'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/router.rb:66:inroute'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/message_processor.rb:19:in process'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/receiver/pop3.rb:41:inblock in get_messages'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/pop.rb:665:in each'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/pop.rb:665:ineach_mail'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/receiver/pop3.rb:40:in get_messages'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/application.rb:118:inblock in polling_loop'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/application.rb:115:in loop'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/application.rb:115:inpolling_loop'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/application.rb:75:in run'
/Users/tummam/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p0/gems/mailman-0.6.0/lib/mailman/application.rb:7:inrun'
script/mailman_server:16:in `'
To me it looks like the observer is the wrong idea to handle further processing. However as I envision it to be rather complex I wanted to decouple it from the receiving part of the application.

Can someone help me out with the observer problem or suggest a better method to do it?

Anyone know how to add stopping/starting the script/mailman_server to Rubber?

I'm confused about a few things.

• Will this work with Rails 4?

• You specify require: false for the mailman gem because you don't want it loaded in Rails but as a separate process. Is this how mailman is meant to be used? No where on mailman's userguide does it mention this.

• There is no script directory in Rails 4? Sure I can just create it, but I imagine there is a better place to put stuff like the mailman_server file?

I can't get past the step where you create a new record using the email contents.

Mailman::Application.run do
  default do
    puts message.from
    puts message.to
    puts message.subject
    puts message.body # or body.decoded, both work
    # The above works, but the below fails.
    Email.create(to: message.to,
                 from: message.from,
                 subject: message.subject,
                 body: message.body.decoded)
  end
end

I get the error type_cast': can't cast Mail::AddressContainer to string.

Full stack trace here.

Hi, I am following this tutorial. I have followed all above steps.

Manual steps before configuring the pop3 server were running all fine. Like: chmod +x script/mailman_server and cat mailman_test.eml | script/mailman_server

But at the last step when I run script/mailman_server in the terminal, I got the error:
Users/nandini/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.3/lib/ruby/2.2.0/net/pop.rb:552:in `connect': SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError)