Midnight Oil

Update I finally bit the bullet and went with Mailchimp. It was a great decision and it’s worth every penny. I’ll leave the original post up in case it’s useful to others.

In a nutshell, mailcar makes it (a little) easier to send a mass emails from your Rails app.

Get the plugin!

Newsletters, feature updates, or God forbid, security breach notices all require sending potentially thousands of emails. There are plenty of service providers who will do it for a fee, but if you’re a small-ish site run by stingy admins (like Obsidian Portal), then you don’t want to drop $100 every time you announce a new feature.

Mailcar is my attempt at simplifying this process a little and making it slightly fault tolerant. You can initiate a mass mailing, let it run for a while, stop it, resume it, and generally not worry about double (or infinite) sends or getting irreversibly interrupted.

In it’s current state (0.1) it does not work out of the box. You’ll need to edit the code directly to insert your own ActionMailer model, and add a function for extracting the list of email addresses. There’s probably other stuff too. I still wanted to post it because it’s a good starting point and the code is very simple, so you should have no trouble finding where to make modifications.

If anyone finds this plugin useful, please take a moment to refactor it and make it more reusable. Send me a pull request or a patch and I’ll put your name in the credits. Hopefully we can get it to a works-out-of-the-box state.

One final warning: sending thousands of emails without knowing what you’re doing will almost certainly land you on a spam blacklist. Double and triple check that your SMTP server is set up correctly with RDNS, SPF, HELO, and other acronyms that I don’t know. Don’t ask me about it because I don’t know. I’d just rather roll the dice on getting blacklisted than pay the bulk sender fees.