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matt swanson
matt swanson

Posted on • Originally published at boringrails.com on

Improving your Rails mailers with `email_address_with_name`

#ruby #rails #webdev

In almost all email programs, you can add a display name before your email address like so:

To: Matt Swanson <matt@example.com>
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It’s a small touch, but it is a more human-readable way of addressing an email. Rails provides a helper utility to format email addresses in this style without resorting to manual string manipulation.

Usage

Use email_address_with_name to add a name in-front on an email address in a standard way

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("swan3788@gmail.com", "Matt Swanson") => "Matt Swanson <swan3788@gmail.com>"
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This helper is available in all Rails mailers.

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer default from: 'notifications@example.com' def welcome_email @user = params[:user] mail( to: email_address_with_name(@user.email, @user.display_name), subject: 'You have a new message' ) end end
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Options

This helper handles nil gracefully as well.

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("swan3788@gmail.com", nil) => "swan3788@gmail.com"
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And it handles escaping characters automatically:

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("mike@example.com", "Michael J. Scott") => "\"Michael J. Scott\" <mike@example.com>" ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("chip@example.com", 'John "Chip" Smith') => "\"John \\\"Chip\\\" Smith\" <chip@example.com>"
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Additional Resources

Rails API: ActionMailer::Base#email_address_with_name

Top comments (1)

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Frederik Ring •

This is only tangential, but do you know if this kind of email address format is somehow specified / named? I was recently looking for libraries that would handle such addresses for me (outside of Rails) and had to come up with my own version. I still have the suspicion though I just don't know the proper name.