ActionMailer plain/text attachments

Does anyone know how to prevent a plain/text attachment to be inline
within an email? Is it as simple as changing the content_type to an
application type?

My app (not a web app) is using ActionMailer outside of rails and
everything is working like a charm, but I don’t like that a plain text
attachment is being placed inline within the email. The attachment is
supporting data or db that I used to create the email. It is actually
a YAML flat file DB. It is quite long and will grow each week up to a
point. Most everyone I’m emailing will not care to see the data
within their email, but a few of my fellow “geeks” will, so a file
would be best.

here is a code snippet:

attachment :content_type => “text/plain”,
:filename => File.basename(yaml_file),
:body => File.read(yaml_file)

Can I force the attachment to be an attachment file and not be inline?

If this is simple, sorry I bothered everyone.

Thanks,

GregD

Okay, it looks like it is up to the recieving end’s app or browser to
render it inline because I dumped the TMail objects and the content-
disposition was “attachment; filename=db.yml”. I’m thinking of trying
a different content-type like application/octet-stream or send a zip/
gz file instead.

How do you send a zip/gzip/bzip2 file? The File.read might not work
correctly below are my thoughts.

Thanks,

GregD

Greg D. wrote:
[…]

The attachment is
supporting data or db that I used to create the email. It is actually
a YAML flat file DB. It is quite long and will grow each week up to a
point. Most everyone I’m emailing will not care to see the data
within their email, but a few of my fellow “geeks” will, so a file
would be best.

How big will this thing grow? If most recipients don’t want to see it,
why are you wasting their disk space with it? If I were one of your
recipients and you were sending me weekly messages with big attachments,
I think I’d be pretty upset. I’d suggest that it would be better to
provide a URL where the full data file can be downloaded by those who
are interested.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Well, it wont get THAT large. Maybe 200K. But, I see your point. I
don’t have have a place to host the file right now. I’d like to send
it compressed since it is plain text. I was even thinking of sending
an xls file summary, but that would be larger.

Does anyone know if I compress it into another file using ZLib gzip
format, how to send it? Actually, any binary file. The examples all
show File.read and will that work with binary files. I would think
not.

I’ll look into hosting the 2 files instead. But, it would be nice to
see an example of sending something other than an image file.

GregD

On Oct 16, 1:38 pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-

Greg D. wrote:

Well, it wont get THAT large. Maybe 200K. But, I see your point. I
don’t have have a place to host the file right now. I’d like to send
it compressed since it is plain text. I was even thinking of sending
an xls file summary, but that would be larger.

Does anyone know if I compress it into another file using ZLib gzip
format, how to send it? Actually, any binary file. The examples all
show File.read and will that work with binary files. I would think
not.

I’ll look into hosting the 2 files instead. But, it would be nice to
see an example of sending something other than an image file.

Image files are binary files (well, except SVG). Any technique for
sending an image file should work for GZip or any other binary format.

GregD

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

Take a look at:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml

There are several registered mime types for zip and gzip files.
These will give you valid values for :content_type.