Minimail sends emails. I use it to send notification emails to myself from scripts. /usr/bin/mail -s 'hi there' bob@example.com can be called from a shell script as well, Minimail just wraps that. Minimail wraps command-line code with descriptive method and variable names and test code, to make maintenance easier. Minimail makes it easier to share this functionality between projects thanks to Rubygems and bundler.

Installation

With bundler

# gem install bundler
gem 'minimail'
bundle

Without bundler

require 'minimail'

Usage

# Send an email (one-liner)
Minimail::Mail.new(:subject => "check it!", :recipients => "bob@example.com").deliver

# Or do the same with a DSL style
m = Minimail::Mail.new
m.draft do
  subject "check it!"
  recipients "bob@example.com"
end
m.deliver

# Include an attachment
Minimail::Mail.new(:subject => "check this attachment", :recipients => "bob@example.com", :attachments => File.join(Dir.pwd, 'test', 'fake_attachment.txt')).deliver

Run tests

# clone source, setup ruby and gemset (I use RVM). rvm use 1.8.7; rvm gemset create minimail; rvm gemset use minimail
# gem install bundler && bundle (make sure bundler "test" group gems are installed)
rake # as of this writing: 6 tests, 11 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors, 0 skips

Debugging

Some ISPs will block the SMTP port or black-list IP addresses. I was not able to send on a Verizon ISP connection for home, but was able to send using my cellular 3G connection (also Verizon) while tethered.

The mail will also likely show up in the spam folder.

# on OS X tail the mail log file
tail -f /var/log/mail.log

Credits

Minimail was inspired by some code from Val Aleksenko. Thanks Val!