Understanding ActionMailer::Base.new

While writing a small plugin I stumbled upon this strangeness. I have TMail objects stored in database for process that sends them out whenever needed.

Obvious way of sending them out would be calling ActionMailer::Base.deliver(my_mail_object)

That works just fine. However I have method chain hooking into instance method deliver!:

alias_method_chain :deliver!, :something_crazy

so I need to send directly using deliver_without_something_crazy! method. Easy, right? All that I need to do is call: ActionMailer::Base.new.deliver_without_something_crazy!(my_mail_object)

Problem is that ActionMailer::Base.new returns nil for whatever reason. That doesn't make much sense to me because this is the definition of deliver method:

ActionMailer::Base.deliver(mail)   new.deliver!(mail) end

So, if I return/raise 'new' inside that function it actually returns ActionMailer::Base object instead of nil. As far as I can see those should be identical calls, returning the same result.

Can anybody shine some light on this?