Testing ActionMailer with Cucumber

Hi,

I'm after some high-level advice on testing ActionMailer events with Cucumber. I want to write a test which ensures that an email has been sent when an action takes place. Is it normal to do this with the ActionMailer running in a test delivery_method? How do others write their tests to ensure that email notifications really are being sent out properly by ActionMailer?

Would writing a test which actually tested that email had been sent by pulling from an IMAP server be too much like testing basic Rails functionality?

Thanks for the advice!