Ar_sendmail is not sending email from the email table with ARMailer

Rails
1

I am using the ar_mailer gem. I have been able to get emails into my
newly created emails table, but when I run ar_sendmail to actually
send the messages from the table, absolutely nothing happens. I run
“ar_sendmail” from my app’s root directory, and it hangs for a few
seconds, like it is processing something, then the prompt comes back
as it has finished. But all the emails are still queued up in the
emails table. Nothing was actually sent, and there are no errors
thrown. I tried running ar_sendmail with some options, such
as …ar_sendmail -d --batch-size 4 --delay 60 --environment
production, but that produced the same result.

My environment.rb file has the correct require: require
‘action_mailer/ar_mailer’

My production.rb file looks like:
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => “localhost”,
:port => 25,
:domain => ‘domain.com’
}
ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :activerecord
ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = false
ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = “utf-8”
ActionMailer::Base.default_content_type = “text/html”

Has anyone else experienced this? Am I missing something else? Is
there a way I can see some debug from ar_sendmail to find out what is
going on in those few seconds that it seems to be doing something?

Thanks in advance!
LAB

2

What does your production.log say?

  • Richard
3

I can see where the email template is used in the production.log file,
and those emails are being added to the emails table properly. When I
do a “ar_sendmail”, to actually send the messages, I get absolutely no
output to the production.log, like it is not even hitting it.

4

Maybe the --environment arg isnt working properly, check the
development log to see if its defaulting to that.

5

Thanks for the quick replies! There is no output to the
development.log either. The interesting thing is, if I do a
“ar_sendmail --mailq”, it prints out the 3 entries I have in the
emails table. So it is connecting to the right table and reading the
data from it. I tried a “ar_sendmail -v” to get the verbose output,
and it says “found 3 messages to send” and then just quits.

Any other ideas?

6

Maybe this is a silly question to ask, has your smtp ever performed
successfully in the past?
If not, perhaps check to make sure the smtp traffic is not blocked. I
had this experience where my rails smtp traffic was quietly blocked by
the corporate firewall and I just couldn’t figure out why the mail
wasn’t going out. I had no error message in my log as well. I
eventually found out about the firewall block.

Just a thought.

7

Make sure you have SMTP server running on your box. ar_sendmail needs to
deleiver email to SMTP server of some sort. To test try

telnet localhost 25

on Mac you would start SMTP server as “sudo postfix start”, on Ubuntu:
“sudo /etc/init.d/postfix start”

Once your SMTP server is running you will be able to tail the logs and
fix the problem: tail -f /var/log/mail.log

8

Hmmm … a good thought, but when I look at the emails table, the
column for “last_send_attempt” is 0 for all my entries. So wouldn’t
that get incremented if it was actually sending the email, but getting
blocked down the line? It seems like it is not even trying to send
the messages, because the last_send_attempt is never changed.

Thanks for any help!