background process for mail delivery

rubyonrails-talk
1

here's my problem: I have a table with lots of emails to be sent at specified dates, and I want a process that checks, let's say every hour or so, that table for mails to be sent, sends them and delete the records...

A very simple background process that call's a method. If there was a way of doing this not in background it'd be ok, I don't care if it gets stuck every hour for a few seconds..

I know about remoterb, but really.. isn't there an easier way? I don't want to spend too much time on this stuff!

thanks everyone! Luca

2

http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/ar_mailer/

3

That thing is too big! And it's meant for delivering mails like a queue. I want to deliver them only when it's time, they might stay there for months, years.. Is there a way that doesn't involve plugins, or just small ones? like a thread.do stuff.. I don't know..

bye

4

Is there some reason a cron job that POSTs an HTTP request to the Rails app wouldn't do the trick?

Snaggy wrote:

5

Look at this.. I know it's a stupid try but I'd like to know why it doesn't work: put in some method..

Thread.new do   while true do     Notifier.deliver_message     sleep 30   end end

Notifier is an action mailer class. Shouldn't this send an email every 30 seconds? Can it access the Notifies class?

confused...

6

where did my reply go ?!?

Anyway Bill, your idea sounds great, but how can I do it? thanks!

7

I have something that does exactly that.

It uses the Daemons gem. I start it by doing

ruby scripts/outgoing_email_thread.rb start/stop/restart

Basically this thread just loops forever. It wakes up and checks for stuff to do by asking the database "Notification.find(:all, :conditions => 'b_distribute = true').each do

n>"

So for me I have a table called Notifications that things get inserted into by my application. If they want batch mode distribution, they set b_distribute = true. This thing gets them, does some mojo and then sends out notifications. Don't get caught up in my crazy code as much as the idea of a Daemon thread you start that loops and does your stuff. My app has about 4 of this bad boys running checking incoming email, sending email, gathering SMS messages, etc.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

8

you do this by using the SQL SSIS jobs also !!!

9

A cron task would also work...

10

You want ar_mailer...

http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2006/08/15/ar_mailer

"Even deliviring email to the local machine may take too long when you have to send hundreds of messages. ar_mailer allows you to store messages into the database for later delivery by a separate process, ar_sendmail."