Sendmail working in Linux Terminal, not in Rails 3

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with Rails 3.2.2.

I just installed and configured sendmail. When mail is sent through terminal it worked perfectly.

But when i try to call it through Rails, no success.

Although it doesn't really looks like it's failing though. I get no errors, and see this in my console:

#<Mail::Message:40338240, Multipart: false, Headers: <From: alert@email.com>, <To: chris@email.com>, <Subject: Hi chris, a testmail too you!>, <Mime-Version: 1.0>, <Content-Type: text/html>, <importance: High>, <X-Priority: 1>> 

I am in development have the following settings in my development.rb:

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail
config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings = { 
      :location => '/usr/sbin/sendmail', 
      :arguments => '-i -t' 
  } 
  config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
  config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true

I have setup an actionmailer, with the corresponding alert_mail.html.erb:

class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default from: "alert@email.com"
  def alert_mail(site)
    @site = site
    @user = site.user
    @url  = "http://example.com/login"
    mail(:to => @user.email_address, :subject => "Hi chris, a testmail too you!", :importance => "High", 'X-Priority' => '1')
  end
end

And this is what I call:

UserMailer.alert_mail(site)

Could it be something with permissions?

Things i've tried - Tried running in production mode - chmod'd the sendmail executables to 777 - Tried removing the priority settings - Running it with rails server instead of nginx

I hope someone can help me, thanks in advance! (email.com is just a replacement, i use a valid domain)

EDIT: sadiqxs answer does indeed solve the problem when I try to execute the mail function through rails console. But it still doesn't work when it is supposed to, through my browser. Strange thing is, this seems to be happening in nginx only. When I stop nginx, and start rails server, then it works. But when I when nginx is the server, it doesnt send any mail.

Answer 1

sadiqxs solution is the part of the answer to my question. It fixes the problem that I was calling the function wrong. But it was still not sending email for me. After a while i manage to get it working.

One of the things I found out is that there was actually another mail log which I did oversee:

/var/log/mail.log.1

It showed me the following error:

sendmail[4453]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(nobody): can not chdir(/var/spool/mqueue-client/): Permission denied

I used ls -ld /var/spool/mqueue-client/ to see that the directory is restricted by the smmsp group:

drwxrws--- 2 smmsp smmsp 4096 2013-01-12 17:51 /var/spool/mqueue-client/

So I added the nobody user (from the error SYSERR(nobody)) to the smmsp group:

usermod -a -G smmsp nobody

I tested again, and it doesn't work yet. After checking the log I got the same error. To be sure I rebooted my server and now the error message changed a little bit:

NOQUEUE: SYSERR(nobody): can not write to queue directory /var/spool/mqueue-client/ (RunAsGid=65534, required=115): Permission denied

After searching and trying useless stuff for a while i decide to change the primary group of nobody to 115 (smmsp) the /etc/psswd file and saw the following settings:

nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh

to

nobody:x:65534:115:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh

This solved my problem and it's sending mails now. I understand that this is not the best solution, but I don't really know how else I would give nobody access, since it's requiring the specific GID. I hope someone else here does.

Answer 2

I think you need to call

 UserMailer.alert_mail(site).deliver