Why does my email confirmation not work?

Question

In my Ruby on Rails application I am trying to send a user a confirmation email when they register on the site. I have followed this link: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html.

And have created the following files:

app/mailers/application_mailer.rb:

class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default sender: "[email protected]"
  layout 'mailer'
end

app/mailers/user_mailer.rb:

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  default from: '[email protected]'

  def welcome_email(user)
    @user = user
    @url  = 'http://localhost:3000/users/login'
    mail(to: @user.email, subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site')
  end
end

app/views/user_mailer/welcome_email.html.erb:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type' />
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.first_name %></h1>
    <p>
      You have successfully signed up to example.com,
      your username is: <%= @user.first_name %><%= @user.last_name %>.<br>
    </p>
    <p>
      To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.
    </p>
    <p>Thanks for joining and have a great day!</p>
  </body>
</html>

app/views/user_mailer/welcome_email.txt.erb:

Welcome to example.com, <%= @user.first_name %>
===============================================

You have successfully signed up to example.com,
your username is: <%= @user.first_name %><%= @user.last_name %>.

To login to the site, just follow this link: <%= @url %>.

Thanks for joining and have a great day!

app/controller/users_controller.rb:

  def create
    @user = User.new(user_params)
    if @user.save
      # login is achieved by saving a user's 'id' in a session variable, 
      # accessible to all pages
       session[:user_id] = @user.id
       UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver_later
       redirect_to films_path
    else
       render action: "new"
    end
  end

I have tried edited this code many times, including:

application_mailer.rb:

class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  # default sender: "[email protected]"
  default from: "[email protected]"
  layout 'mailer'
end

users_controller.rb:

UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver_now

And have also tried other things. The most interesting thing is that when I change the user_mailer.rb to:

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  default from: '[email protected]'

  def welcome_email(user)
    @user = user
    @url  = 'http://localhost:3000/users/login'
    # mail(to: @user.email, subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site')
    mail(to: '[email protected]', subject: 'Welcome to My Awesome Site')
  end
 end

Which has the email address hardcoded in, still nothing works. I am getting no error messages and a user can still register but no emails are being received.

I am using the following:

Rails version: rails 4.2.0

Operating System: Windows 7

I am connecting to the rails server through localhost:3000 - it is running on my own machine.

I have tried sending emails to a gmail and a tiscali account but neither have worked.

Schema.rb:

create_table "users", force: :cascade do |t|
    t.string   "password_digest"
    t.string   "role"
    t.datetime "created_at",      null: false
    t.datetime "updated_at",      null: false
    t.string   "first_name"
    t.string   "last_name"
    t.string   "house_no"
    t.string   "street"
    t.string   "town"
    t.string   "postcode"
    t.string   "email"
    t.date     "date_of_birth"
  end

Can someone please help? Is it because I am trying to run an email system on my own machine through localhost:3000 without using a server? Is it something to do with SMTP?

Has anyone got any ideas?

in config/environments/development.rb do you have config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true and config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true? and can you post your config.action_mailer.smtp_settings setup? — basiam

Dabrorius Dabrorius · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-02T19:16:54

You should probably check out this part of documentation. Rails can't and don't send emails by default in your development environment. You need to configure a mail server.

Or you could use something like letter_opener gem which will simulate email sending, but it will open your emails as new browser tabs instead. This is quite convenient for development, and you can use real mail server for production.

Why does my email confirmation not work?

2 Answers