Asynchronous Actionmailer in Rails

Question

I've noticed some of my actions (on a development environment) take a little while to load up as an email they require an email notification (through Google's servers). Do I need to implement asynchronous handling of emails like - http://upstream-berlin.com/2008/05/19/new-rails-plugin-for-making-actionmailer-asynchronous/

Answer 1

Offloading potentially long-running tasks such as sending emails in to the background is a good idea to improve the responsiveness of your application, albeit by sacrificing the simplicity of your application a little.

One popular way to do this (which I have used with great success) is using Delayed Job. The README file contains examples of how simple it is to send email in the background -- basically you just use the send_later method.

Here's a link to another good tutorial:

http://railstips.org/2008/11/19/delayed-gratification-with-rails