Acts As Emailable

acts_as_emailable is a plugin developed to solve a problem I seem to come up against quite regularly when developing sites with a certain level of user interaction. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to create an internal email system within their site.

Setup

First up you need to install the plugin. This can be done like so:

script/plugin install svn://matt-beedle.com:3396/acts_as_emailable

Then generate the model and migration for the emails table.

script/generate acts_as_emailable_model Email
rake db:migrate

Now you are ready to go. Just add the following line of code to your User model:

class User &lt; ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_emailable
  #
  # The rest of you code
end

Usage

After the plugin is installed the following methods become available to your User class.

These methods are the associations. They return what you would expect: user.users_whom_i_have_emailed user.users_who_have_emailed_me user.unread_mail user.read_mail

Return all users who have emailed or been emailed by the user along with the associated email data user.all_mail

Return all new mail (alias for unread_mail) user.new_mail

Return all old mail (alias for read_mail) user.old_mail

Accepts a user object as the receiver, and an email and creates an email relationship joining the two users user.send_mail(receiver, email)