View emails sent

Question

I have config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test and use delayed_job. I run some code that places an email to be sent in a queue, then run rake jobs:work, but nowhere do I see the email that is sent out, and ActionMailer::Base.deliveries is nil. I'm just looking to debug and view the content of htese emails, how can I do so?

Answer 1

When config.action_mailer.delivery_method is set to :test, emails are not actually sent but instead merely added to a list of "sent" messages. That list exists only in memory. That means only the process that "sent" the email can see the list and verify that it was actually "sent".

Since the code that actually sends your mail is being executed in an external process (through a system() or backtick call), your calling script won't be able to see the in-memory queue of that external process and thus won't be able to verify that the emails were actually "sent".

This shouldn't really be a big deal unless something has gone wrong. By default outgoing emails will be written to the log file, so you can verify that they're actually sending by checking there. If you want to view/manipulate the queue in-memory, you'll have to add code to your job to do so, as that is the only code that will have access to it.