How to Send Mail with Rails Without a Template

How can I send mail with rails without a template?

The simplest way to send mail in rails 3 without a template is to call the mail method of ActionMailer::Base directly followed by the deliver method,

For ex, the following would send a plain text e-mail:

ActionMailer::Base.mail(
  from: "me@example.com",
  to: "you@example.com",
  subject: "test",
  body: "test"
).deliver

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html#method-i-mail gives you all the header options and also ideas about the how to send a multipart/alternative email with text/plain and text/html parts directly.

ActionMailer without template and multipart email

class TestMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  def welcome_email
    mail(to: 'example@example.com', subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site') do |format|
      format.html { render html: '<h1>Welcome XYZ!</h1>'.html_safe }
      format.text { render plain: 'Welcome XYZ' }
    end
  end
end

To use it call: TestMailer.welcome_email.deliver_now.

Documentation, section 2.4

How to send Email sending without html format

The email client will render those tags once the email is received by the user and you will not see any of them. An email template is treated very much like a View in Rails. if you take everything between <html> and </html> and save it in a file and open it in a browser, that's what the email will look like for the user.

Also you want to send an absolute path in your email link, that is a relative link you have right now and if the user clicks it outside your website (from an email client) it will not work.

Rails mailer without view

I found the way by experimentation :

mail(:to => email, :subject => 'we found the answer') do |format|
  format.text do
    render :text => '42 owns the World'
  end
end

This is also said in the Rails Guide :
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html at section 2.4

How to send HTML form data as email in Rails? (without using a gem)

At first, you need to install smtp server for sending email, Heroku has an add-on for Sendgrid email install and configure this.

Then run below command for creating email class and template

rails generate mailer ContactMailer

it will generate like below

create  app/mailers/contact_mailer.rb
create  app/mailers/application_mailer.rb
invoke  erb
create    app/views/contact_mailer
create    app/views/layouts/mailer.text.erb
create    app/views/layouts/mailer.html.erb
invoke  test_unit
create    test/mailers/contact_mailer_test.rb
create    test/mailers/previews/contact_mailer_preview.rb

You can follow this for basic Rails Mailer, also here is a full tutorial for sending an email with a contact form and mail folders structure how mail classes and templates work together.

ActionMailer sending Blank emails, not rendering templates, Rails 3

It was a silly mistake, like i knew it would be! A Git commit pointed it out...

create mode 100644 app/views/user_mailer/ welcome_email.html.erb
create mode 100644 app/views/user_mailer/ welcome_email.text.erb

Whitespace at the start of the file name, which is really hard to notice in Sublime Text!

So easy to loose 2 days on silly mistakes, But i learned lots trying to figure it out!