ExpanDrive

This is not a joke. The Gmail team has enabled an “Undo Send” feature in Gmail Labs. There’s no black magic or voodoo; it just holds onto your message for five seconds in case you want a panic take-back. After that, the email is gone and un-recallable, just like normal.

I rarely use the Gmail web interface, but I’ve thought about writing a Mail.app plugin to do this for years. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to scramble into the “Sending…” folder and delete a message before it escapes. I’ve never once pulled it off.

Here is a bit of help getting Redmine, or any Rails app, to send email over SMTP through an existing Gmail account. It’s quite easy to set up and you gain the usual perks of having everything centralized in a Gmail account. Note: this works with Google Apps for your domain, too.

First you’ll need to install the smtp_tls plugin into your application’s lib directory so you can correctly authenticate. For posterity, I’ve uploaded a copy smtp_tls.rb along with this post.

www@host:~/redmine$ cd lib
www@host:~/redmine/lib$ curl -O http://blog.expandrive.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/smtp_tls.rb

Redmine utilizes email.yml to configure ActionMailer. Here’s what ours looks like:

production:
    delivery_method: :smtp
    smtp_settings:
      address: smtp.gmail.com
      port: 587
      domain: gmail.com
      authentication: :login
      user_name: info@expandrive.com
      password: password

Next, in production.rb makre sure to

require 'smtp_tls'

That’s it, you’re good to go.

If you want to set up any old Rails app [using Action Mailer] to send mail via Gmail, add this to production.rb

require 'smtp_tls' 
 
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = "utf-8"
 
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "gmail.com",
:authentication => :login,
:user_name => "info@expandrive.com",
:password => "password",
}