ActionMailer plain/text attachments

rubyonrails-talk
#1

Does anyone know how to prevent a plain/text attachment to be inline
within an email? Is it as simple as changing the content_type to an
application type?

My app (not a web app) is using ActionMailer outside of rails and
everything is working like a charm, but I don't like that a plain text
attachment is being placed inline within the email. The attachment is
supporting data or db that I used to create the email. It is actually
a YAML flat file DB. It is quite long and will grow each week up to a
point. Most everyone I'm emailing will not care to see the data
within their email, but a few of my fellow "geeks" will, so a file
would be best.

here is a code snippet:

attachment :content_type => "text/plain",
               :filename => File.basename(yaml_file),
               :body => File.read(yaml_file)

Can I force the attachment to be an attachment file and not be inline?

If this is simple, sorry I bothered everyone.

Thanks,

GregD

#2

Okay, it looks like it is up to the recieving end's app or browser to
render it inline because I dumped the TMail objects and the content-
disposition was "attachment; filename=db.yml". I'm thinking of trying
a different content-type like application/octet-stream or send a zip/
gz file instead.

How do you send a zip/gzip/bzip2 file? The File.read might not work
correctly below are my thoughts.

Thanks,

GregD

#3

Well, it wont get THAT large. Maybe 200K. But, I see your point. I
don't have have a place to host the file right now. I'd like to send
it compressed since it is plain text. I was even thinking of sending
an xls file summary, but that would be larger.

Does anyone know if I compress it into another file using ZLib gzip
format, how to send it? Actually, any binary file. The examples all
show File.read and will that work with binary files. I would think
not.

I'll look into hosting the 2 files instead. But, it would be nice to
see an example of sending something other than an image file.

GregD

#4

Take a look at:
   http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml

There are several registered mime types for zip and gzip files.
These will give you valid values for :content_type.