how to raise/rescue from ActionMailer deliver method

Question

I am sending emails with the following method:

class Communicate < ActionMailer::Base
  def message(sub,msg,people)
    subject    sub
    bcc        people
    from       'my_email.s@gmail.com'
    sent_on    Time.now

    body       :greeting => msg
  end
end

bcc contains 4 or 5 email addresses.

During my testing I've noticed two things:

• That if even one of the emails is not an actual email (for example fake_email_no_domain) it does not send emails to any of the recipients
• if the bcc list has a bad email address (for example nonexistent@gmail.com) then it still sends emails to other recipients but still throws an error to the logs.

In both scenarios the error that is thrown is:

Redirected to http://localhost:3000/
Completed in 2601ms (DB: 1) | 302 Found [http://localhost/notifications]

    [2010-08-04 00:49:00] ERROR Errno::ECONNRESET: Connection reset by peer
        /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:56:in `eof?'
        /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:56:in `run'
        /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/server.rb:183:in `block in start_thread'

Questions:

• Is there any way I can catch this error? I am showing a flash[:notice] to the user and i'd like to mention that something bad happened
• If my BCC list has 5 emails and really only 4 emails are sent because 5th was nonexistent email then after all is done can I get a number of how many emails were actually sent? I'd like to show that number in my flash[:notice]. I can get this number by actually calling the delivery method in a iteration rather then sending as bulk but still I would not want to increment the count if one email is not sent.

Answer 1

If I am writing the code to sent the email in controller i can write like these to handle the rescue in my application I'm using something like this in the controller:

if @user.save
  begin
  UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver
  flash[:success] = "#{@user.name} created"
  rescue Net::SMTPAuthenticationError, Net::SMTPServerBusy, Net::SMTPSyntaxError, Net::SMTPFatalError, Net::SMTPUnknownError => e
  flash[:success] = "User #{@user.name} creating Problems sending mail"
  end
  redirect_to home_index_path
end

Answer 2

Add or uncomment following line in the config/environments/development.rb and restart your server.

# Don't care if the mailer can't send
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

I assume you check for the development for production add line in config/environments/production.rb