Sending Email

Agenda

• Warm Up
• Overview of how email works
• Exercise to set-up email in Rails
• Q&A

Learning Goals

• High level understanding of how emails work
• How to use ActionMailer in Rails
• Sending email in development environment with Mailcatcher
• How to test that a mailer is working

Warm Up

• How do you personally use email?
• How might you use emails in an application?

Why is Email Important?

• User Interaction!!!
  • Mailing Lists
  • Notifications
  • Order Updates
  • Account Management

How does email work?

• Handled by mail servers
  • Outgoing mail servers
  • Incoming mail servers

Email Protocols

• SMTP
• IMAP
• POP

SMTP

• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• Outgoing mail protocol
• “Store and Forward”

IMAP

• Internet Message Access Protocol
• Retrieval protocol
• Reads email from the server
  • Synchronizes computer emails with the server

POP

• Post Office Protocol
• Retrieval protocol
• Downloads email from server

Visualizing Sending Email

Steps to Sending Email

1. Compose the Email and Send
   • Email client sends to the SMTP Server
2. SMTP Server checks if the domain is valid and gets the recipient’s IP address
   • Using the IP address it sends the message to the internet
3. The recipient’s SMTP server receives the email and if it recognizes the domain and user name it forwards to the POP or IMAP server
4. Recipient then connects to the POP of IMAP server to read the email

Let’s Try it in Rails

• Using the friendly-advice repo follow the walk-through to send an email locally
• We will come back together to answer any questions and wrap-up