1.9 Compat and merging mail gem into ActionMailer

rubyonrails-core
1

Hi all of both RoR Core and TMail.

You may know me better as the maintainer of TMail.

However, TMail has been a bit difficult to get working with Ruby 1.9, so in the light of that, I sat down over the past few months and wrote myself an all encompasing mail gem. Mail passes all of its hundreds of specs equally well in Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.1. Mail reads every email in the TMail test suite without crashing, and is designed to never crash on parsing input (I know, can't really say that, but it is very resilient to crap).

The point is that TMail is _not_ 1.9 compatible and is _hard_ to get compatible. Mail is compatible, however needs some more work to make it a TMail replacement.

I announced it on Ruby-Talk on the 25th of you are interested, "[ANN] mail 1.0.0" You can get mail from gemcutter, or from http://github.com/mikel/mail

But this email is to solicit help and testing of a rewrite of ActionMailer to use the installed mail gem instead of the bundled tmail lib/vendor.

I have forked ActionMailer at: http://github.com/mikel/rails/tree/master/actionmailer/ and I welcome help / testing / code on getting this done.

Mail is "very" ruby. And we can abstract a LOT of code out of ActionMailer that is already written (or should be written) into Mail. Part handling for example, attachments, nesting multipart/report handling, all is in Mail itself... no need for actionmailer to duplicate it.

With very little code changes to ActionMailer, I am down to about 79 errors / failures, most of these are highlighting areas I need to improve mail itself, which is fantastic. But with a bit of help, we can knock this over very fast.

Mail is doing fairly well. It needs some refactoring, but I am expecting several .x releases over the next weeks as we refactor and get it working with ActionMailer.

Any comments / suggestions, all welcome.

2

This sounds really cool. I’ll take a careful look at it next week. Is there anything specific you could use help with?

– Yehuda

3

I think the biggest "gotcha" on any mail library is the handling of multibyte character sets and encoding and decoding therewith. Especially when you are trying to stay 1.8...1.9 compatible.

So that is where my energy is being focused now, and where I would appreciate any help.

In terms of the ActionMailer integration, the trick is going to be separating out what is domain specific to actionmailer, and what is domain specific to mail. My real goal is to make Mail an Email DSL, and it is pretty close now. ActionMailer shouldn't really have anything like quoting.rb, part.rb, part_container.rb, or worry about delivery of email, or fetching of email... there shouldn't be any call to Net::SMTP or POP3 or the like from ActionMailer for example.

Even doing things like Base64 Encoding in ActionMailer can be delegated to the Mail gem. Mail is almost at the point where it will intelligently encode anything it finds if it is not US-ASCII, in the body, or in the headers.

Of course, you can over ride this in Mail by sending it US-ASCII strings (ie, pre encoded to the encoding of your choice) and then add your content-transfer-encoding, but this shouldn't be needed for something like ActionMailer.

Anyway, I think the goal is to separate the domains between ActionMailer and Mail. This will clean up ActionMailer a lot (which is a bit of a neglected child really) and provide a clear separation to the mail gem. It would even make it possible for people to "require 'other-mail'" gem instead if that floats their boat. Right now, it is TMail or nothing.

Mikel

4

Very cool.

I completely agree with your perspective; I wrote the original merb-mailer, which was a tiny extension to Merb’s AbstractController. José Valim recently made ActionMailer work with the new AbstractController, freeing it from concerns like layouts and helpers.

It would be nice to figure out what the abstraction point really was. Are you available on GTalk? I’m wycats@gmail.com. I’d love to chat.

– Yehuda