Handle mail server problems

Rails
1

I’m making a rails application that regularly sends out e-mails to
users. While testing recently a controller got a timeout when trying
to send an e-mail. => the mail server was down.

Is there an easy way to handle something like this? Or do I have to
handle a timeout-exception whereever sending of mail is initiated?

I’m grateful for any help!

2

The best way is probably to have a queue that you store your emails in
and then have a cron job to deliver them. I use railmail and modified
it to work as a queue instead of immediately deliver the emails.

You can wrap it in a timeout block also. It goes something like

Timeout::timeout(10) do
#send your email with a 10 second timeout
end

rescue Timeout::Error
#log the error

Thanks
Fredrik

On Aug 22, 6:09 am, Eivind Løland-Andersen [email protected]

3

On Aug 22, 4:11 pm, Fredrik [email protected] wrote:

rescue Timeout::Error
#log the error

Thanks! I think that timeout solution will do just fine. I agree that
the best thing would be to put the e-mails into a queue, but in my app
the e-mails are sendt as notifications, and must be sent immediately.

4

Eivind Løland-Andersen wrote:

#send your email with a 10 second timeout
end

rescue Timeout::Error
#log the error

Thanks! I think that timeout solution will do just fine. I agree that
the best thing would be to put the e-mails into a queue, but in my app
the e-mails are sendt as notifications, and must be sent immediately.

You can send them immediately in a background process that can try
several times if a timeout occurs before giving up. Take a look at
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToRunBackgroundJobsInRails

I’ve tried ap4r and backgroundrb. Both are not very well documented,
however I found it easier to cope with ap4r.

–
Sava C.

5

On Aug 22, 1:07 pm, Eivind Løland-Andersen [email protected]
wrote:

Thanks! I think that timeout solution will do just fine. I agree that
the best thing would be to put the e-mails into a queue, but in my app
the e-mails are sendt as notifications, and must be sent immediately.

Even though most mail servers use queues that does not mean they don’t
immediately try to deliver email. You really are better off letting
the mail server handle it rather than write your own mail server in
Ruby.

6

btw - as an alternative, try activemessaging - I use it for exactly this
problem:
http://code.google.com/p/activemessaging/
Cheers,
-A

On 8/23/07, Sava C. [email protected] wrote:

You can wrap it in a timeout block also. It goes something like
the e-mails are sendt as notifications, and must be sent immediately.

–
Andrew K.