Better to use ruby to send email instead of rails context?

Rails
1

If my web app needs to send email notifications that are not time
sensitive (e.g. they can wait a few minutes), do you think it’s better
for my web app to put the message on a queue or in the db for another
program (e.g. plain ruby) to load up and send the email? I know I can
still send them asynchronously by putting them on a queue and then
having a background process load up the rails context to send them, but
I don’t know much about this and am wondering if I do that, would it be
that much more scalable to just have plain ruby or any other standalone
simple custom mailer program written in Java or whatever doing the
emailing?

2

standalone
simple custom mailer program written in Java or whatever doing the
emailing?

You may want to look at ar_mailer

http://blog.segment7.net/articles/2006/08/15/ar_mailer

-philip