Rob Seaman

In Adding Gmail SSL SMTP Support to Rails I described the use of a simple Rails plugin to provide SSL SMTP support. Today I upgraded to a new version of Mephisto and while testing it in production I discovered that I couldn't send emails. It turns out that it had nothing to do with the Mephisto upgrade; my DreamHost server had been updated to Ruby 1.8.7 and the action_mailer_tls plugin I was using wasn't compatible. Oh well, I guess I deserved that surprise for using shared hosting and adding a monkey patch plugin. This post describes a simple fix.

The problem occurred because the 1.8.7 version of Net::SMTP changed its private check_auth_args method. Fortunately, I had just removed the action_mailer_tls plugin from Cached Externals so I was able to do a quick code fix in the plugins directory. Here's the change I made to vendor/plugins/action_mailer_tls/lib/smtp_tls.rb.

In Net::SMTP.class_eval#do_start replace:

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check_auth_args user, secret, authtype if user or secret

with:

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RUBY_VERSION.match(/(\d+)\.(\d+)\.(\d+)/)
if ($1.to_i <= 1 && $2.to_i <= 8 && $3.to_i <= 6)
  check_auth_args user, secret, authtype if user or secret
elsif user or secret
  check_auth_method(authtype || DEFAULT_AUTH_TYPE)
  check_auth_args user, secret
end

Check it in:

[mac]$ git add vendor/plugins/action_mailer_tls/lib/smtp_tls.rb
[mac]$ git commit -a -m "Fixed auth check method for 1.8.7 compatibility."

And deploy it:

[mac]$ cap deploy

If you're starting from scratch and want something that already works I did notice there are other similar solutions with 1.8.7 support available on the Internet. Simplificator's tls-support gem on github is one example.