Trying to add html email capabilites (multi-part)

Rails
1

I am trying to achieve sending a multipart newsletter so that people
with html mail capabilities will see a glorified version of the email,
and people like me who use pine will see plaintext.

As of right now, I have:
part “text/plain” do |p|
if newsletter.newsletter.length == 0
p.body = “”
else
greeting = contact.first_name || ‘Hello’
p.body = “#{greeting},\n\n” + newsletter.newsletter
end
end

      part "text/html" do |p|
         if newsletter.newsletter.length == 0
            p.body = ""
         else
            greeting = contact.first_name || 'Hello'
            p.body = "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01

Transitional//EN’>


#{greeting},

" + newsletter.newsletter +
“

”
end
end

     newsletter.attachments.each do |attachment|
        part attachment.content_type do |p|
           p.body = attachment.contents
           p.filename = attachment.filename
           p.transfer_encoding = 'base64'
        end
     end
  rescue
     return false
  end

  return true

end
end

however this is rendering HTML as an “attachment”… I am very unclear
about how this is supposed to work, but I just know if I look at an
email sent by Yahoo for example, their html mail shows up as plaintext,
and I see a separate index that I can select in pine which will then
attempt to launch a browser to view it… And if I look at this same
email in a browser, it appears as a nice clean html version. However
when looking at my own email in pine, it displays both side by side as
PART1: plaintext and PART2: HTML…

This is the same behavior when viewing in a browser as you can see here:
http://www.collinatorstudios.com/www/budokonmail2.png

I tried changing this to have:
part :content_type => “text/html”,
:body => render_message(“signup-as-html”, :account => recipient)
as I saw on several websites that were giving tutorial discussions on
html email within ruby on rails, bowever this did not work…

2

Patrick Collins wrote:

I am trying to achieve sending a multipart newsletter so that people
with html mail capabilities will see a glorified version of the email,
and people like me who use pine will see plaintext.

I think you are trying too hard. You can create an rhtml file for every
“part” and action mailer will pick them up automagically.

With these views:

  • signup_notification.text.plain.rhtml
  • signup_notification.text.html.rhtml
  • signup_notification.text.xml.rxml
  • signup_notification.text.x-yaml.rhtml

Mailer.deliver_signup_notification will send an email with 4 parts with
the content types of:

  • text/plain
  • text/html
  • text/xml
  • text/x-yaml

http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html

As a bonus you model stays dead simple with just the info it needs and
no more.

3

Alex W. wrote:

You can create an rhtml file for every “part” and action mailer will pick them up automagically.

Forgive me, but I am really new at ruby on rails… This current app code
was written by a developer and I am trying to add HTML capabilities to
it myself.

The app is a contact hub which you select a large number of email
addresses and then send a newsletter to them. You go to a specific file
and type into a standard html form text box, and then the email gets
sent… The text in the box is what was described in my code
“newsletter.newsletter”…

So I was imagining since plaintext works, the easiest thing would be to
place whatever the contents of newsletter.newsletter into html data…
Of course I also realized that I need a way to convert carriage returns
within newsletter.newsletter to “
”.

However, if you have a better way to go, to get newsletter.newsletter to
become an actual html and plaintext file, I would love to know how to do
this.

Thanks in advance.

-patrick