Recommendations for a contact function using an existing icloud email

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I’m currently working on a website with a contact function and I would like to program that function to link to my icloud email address to send me any emails created through it. But I am not sure on how to fully link the two sources. What are some of your recommendations for using Rails to link to an icloud email account? I have already made a contact function utilizing Mailcatcher for it, but I believe I can do better with something like that.

2

Are you looking to have contact messages mailed to your address after they are created on your Rails site? Have a read of the ActionMailer integration, in that case. You will need to set up an SMTP service, either on your server, or more reliably, on a paid or free-tier SMTP-as-a-service provider like SendGrid or similar. Then it’s just a matter of creating a mailer and configuring the service.

In one simple app, I made the following model to handle this, since I didn’t care to save these to the database. They’re just mailed on to me if they pass validation.

class Contact
  include ActiveModel::Model
  attr_accessor :name, :email, :message

  # bunch of validations here...
end

I have two different mailers, one to send a thanks message back to the sender, and another to send me the contact.

I set up a ContactController and used the #create method to process the form requests:

  def create
    @contact = Contact.new contact_params
    if @contact.valid?
      NotificationMailer.contact(@contact).deliver_now if @contact.valid?(:notification)
      ThanksMailer.contact(@contact).deliver_now if @contact.valid?(:thanks)
      render :thanks
    else
      render :new
    end
  end

I use two different mailers, and validate them separately, because I reply more often than I actually care to see the contents of the message. (If you send a reply to a spammer, they feel like their job is done, and don’t try harder to get around my rudimentary filters.)

Your question, though, said that you want to link to your e-mail account. Do you mean being able to see any messages in that mailbox? That sounds like you want to investigate an IMAP client library for Rails.

Walter

3

Thank you. I’ll look more into this!