Sending mail with devise and Gmail smtp server

Question

I am using Devise :confirmable and :recoverable module to confirm a user and to let him recover his password if he forgets it. Everything is going fine, the mail gets generated and I can see it in the server log, but then I am facing errors and the mail is not delivered to the mailbox. The SMTP settings for my environment.rb file is :

require 'tlsmail'
Net::SMTP.enable_tls(OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE)
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :enable_starttls_auto => true,  #this is the important shit!
  :address => 'smtp.gmail.com', #'localhost', 
  :port => 587,
  :tls => true,
  :domain => 'mail.google.com',  # mail.customdomain.com if you use google apps
  :authentication => :login,
  :user_name => '[email protected]',
  :password => '_secret_password'
} 

If the :address is 'smtp.gmail.com' , then i get the following error:

SocketError (getaddrinfo: Name or service not known):

If i set the :address to 'localhost', then i get the following error:

Errno::ECONNREFUSED Connection refused - connect(2)

I don't know what this :address means, a newbie for all this stuff. On running uname -a, i get

Linux jatin-ubuntu 2.6.32-24-generic #38-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jul 5 09:22:14 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

In my /etc/hosts file the entries are :

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   jatin-ubuntu

*#74.125.93.109   smtp.gmail.com 
#The above entry added by me*

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

When I uncomment the 'smtp.gmail.com' address in the /etc/hosts file, the following error is gone :

SocketError (getaddrinfo: Name or service not known):

and now the error is :

Errno::ECONNREFUSED Connection refused - connect(2)

I don't know what is going wrong, googled for the errors and tried everything but nothing came to rescue. I do have the 'tlsmail' gem installed and the 'mail' gem as well, and my application is in development mode. Help me fix this error so that i can happily continue my rails journey and if possible guide me a little over this :address issue in the right direction so that i understand the basics of this. Thanks in advance

Solution

If you're still having problems with this try using these settings:

require 'tlsmail'    
Net::SMTP.enable_tls(OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE)

ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :enable_starttls_auto => true,  
  :address            => 'smtp.gmail.com',
  :port               => 587,
  :tls                  => true,
  :domain             => 'gmail.com', #you can also use google.com
  :authentication     => :plain,
  :user_name          => '[email protected]',
  :password           => '_secret_password'
}

Additionally I would recommend putting these settings in your config/environments/development.rb file instead of environment.rb so that you can specify different mailservers for each environment.

Comments

[Jatin Ganhotra]

@Rio Tera: I am a newbie to all this stuff, so couldn't understand what you are guiding me to. Could you elaborate a bit

[riotera]

:domain probably should be your domain 'example.com'

[Jatin Ganhotra]

@Rio tera: I don't have my own domain till yet, a newbie to web development. What should i do then?? Is having your own domain a prerequisite for this?? If yes, i will purchase one asap

[riotera]

please try with :domain => "gmail.com", :username => "jatinkumar.nitk", :authentication => :plain

[Jatin Ganhotra]

@Rio tera : tried "gmail.com" and other things as u said...didn't work

[riotera]

My last chance to help you: set the :domain to your ip server.

[Jatin Ganhotra]

@Rio tera: Thanks for your help.Tried both machine's local network i/p address and current external (internet) address, didn't work. I am very much confused now, can you guide me to a tutorial for the basics of these things, just to get a clear idea.

[Jatin Ganhotra]

Thanks man...It did really work. Could you also pen down the settings if I have a domain of my own and a user-name by that domain.?

[Jatin Ganhotra]

@RioTera: Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.

[Braden Becker]

Just change domain to be your domain and user_name to be [email protected]... Everything else should be the same.

[shibly]

With this settings, will it send email from [email protected] to any mailing address ?

[Jared Beck]

Apparently, :domain is optional, though you wouldn't know that from reading the docs.

[Noz]

After hours of debugging the mysterious OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError error, this was the only solution that eventually did it for me!