Also, SSMTP is a synchronous send, so more likely than not, you will experience the problems you’ve described if something happens to GMail’s servers. If you want reliable delivery, I would look into postfix, or ar_mailer, as Kevin suggested!

Thanks for that tip about ar_mailer. I will definitely look into that!

It will also keep retrying until the external mail server is contactable and accepts the mail for delivery.

http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-use-gmails-smtp-server-with-rails-394.html

I am currently using a plugin that lets my rails app directly talk to Gmail’s smtp servers using TLS (which base rails in incapable of doing).

My concern with this synchronous approach though is that my app will hang waiting for gmails smtp servers if for some reason they become temporarily unavailable.

Does the ssmtp approach return immediately from the perspective of the rails app, and then handle the slow external communication with an offsite smtp server like gmails on its own? This would be a nice way to decouple my rails app from the smtp service.

Does ssmtp do any retries if it can’t send on the first try?

Thanks!

Is there a way to do that with this method? It seems you’re locked into the one account since you put those details in the ssmtp.conf file. I don’t suppose there’s a way to override this periodically?