Mailtime

Makes sending mail with Rails ~~great again~~ more bearable by allowing you to manage the mail from ActiveRecord as well as log it.

Not using ActionMailer?

No problem, but it's untested. Check out Without ActionMailer below.

Mailtime...

Does

Tells you (via ActiveRecord object) that a thing has been mailed, what they were mailed, and under what context
(optionally) allows you to completely manage your ActionMailer templates (and optional layouts) from ActiveRecord

Does not

Operate as any sort of SMTP/mail protocol service/server

Installation

Add to your Gemfile: gem 'mailtime'

Run bundle install

Copy over migrations

$ rake mailtime:install:migrations

And migrate,

rake db:migrate

Usage

ActiveRecord Objects

Add mailtimer NAME [options] to each class that has an email attribute associated with it (or, rather, is emailable)

NAME is the attribute (within ActiveRecord) that holds the object's email address. Default email
[options] is your favorite optional hash but is mostly useless as of writing.

In your mailer methods

Mailtime serializes a collection of defined instance variables in your mailer method. Additionally, it detects the Mailtime::Log#thing by using Rails conventions — if there is an instance variable with a class of Person in PersonMailer/PersonsMailer/PeopleMailer, it will assign the thing (polymorphic) to that object.

Skip a method

skip_mailtime_for :welcome in your mailer class.

How it works

Mailtime hooks into ActionMailer with an Interceptor. It injects some methods into ActionMailer::Base which allows it to to extract some metadata to associate with the Mailtime objects: Mailtime::Log, Mailtime::Template, and Mailtime::Layout.

Mailtime requires no additional configuration or special sending methods. It only cares that you're using ActionMailer. This could be easily changed to suit your application's needs.

Without ActionMailer

Before you attempt mail delivery, hook into Mailtime::Interceptor and pass the closest-thing-to-a-mail-object object. This object must respond to mailtime_metadata and be an object that contains mailer_class, mailer_action, and action_variables — a hash that represents any context (instance variables) that were used to build the mail. Example.

Pretending closest-thing-to-a-mail-object object is called mail_api_call from class MailApiCall...

class MailApiCall

  def mailtime_metadata
    OpenStruct.new(
      :mailer_class => self.class.to_s, 
      :mailer_action => self.action_name,
      :action_variables => {:user => @user},
      :thing => @user 
    )
  end

end

Views

Mailtime doesn't ship with views or authentication for said non-existent views.

About

It's very opinioniated right now.

Inspiration

Todo

Some examples for ERB, ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin
Allow you to mail things (e.g. User, Account) using ActiveMailer without touching code (with contexts to query things to mail)
Versioning is probably important since you can edit the mailer's contents, and Mailtime doesn't store the output
Maybe Mailtime should store the output?
... maybe Mailtime should build and store the output when a version limit is reached for a particular mailer?
Support MySQL and things that don't support JSON columns
Mail header API or something
before/after hooks?

Is it any good?

Yes.

joshmn/mailtime