Using Google Apps Email as Your App’s SMTP Server

27 Apr 2009

Something I’ve held out on for a while now has been to switch over the settings for ActionMailer in my application(s) to point to my hosted Google apps account.   I figured it was probably time to do so as piping email notifications through my comcast email account is generally, probably, a bad idea (courtesy of the “No Duh” department).

Seems like it should be rather easy, no?  Just change action mailer to resemble:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port => 587,
  :domain => "hosteddomain.com",
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
  :password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}

Meh. Looks easy enough, right? Except for the fact Google’s got some magic TLS authentication thing going on – you’ll run into an error in your mailers resembling Must issue a STARTTLS command first.. Enough to make you work a little harder to get the magic working.

For those of you/us that are running Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.x the answer is rather simple – add :enable_starttls_auto => true to your smtp settings, which will result in :

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :enable_starttls_auto => true,
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port => 587,
  :domain => "hosteddomain.com",
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name => "account@hosteddomain.com",
  :password => "omgsup3rsecret"
}

And for the rest of you/us (that would be me) that are still sticking with Ruby 1.8.6, there is an answer in the form of the action_mailer_tls gem. Following the readme will get you to right where you want to be – shoveling all the mail you would like into the ether that is the interwebs.