How to enable TLS support in Ruby’s/Rails’ Net::SMTP

Ruby on Rails uses Ruby 1.8 which still lacks support for STARTTLS or SSL. This was added in Ruby 1.9, but as this release is designated to be unstable (and only the road to a stable Ruby 2.0) Rails 2.0 doesn’t support running with it.

What to do? It’s a shame that a web framework like Rails doesn’t support secure transmission of mails.

So I rolled my own Ruby on Rails plugin that extends the base Net::SMTP class with STARTTLS features. You can just call Net::SMTP.enable_tls (or do the same with an instance variable) to enable secure communications.

Honestly I didn’t write all the code on my own but searched the net and adapted some around-floating patches to this plugin as this is the easiest way of providing the needed TLS support to rails.

So if you need it, just grab it from here. More Information can be found in the plugin’s README file. Have fun and share your improvements to the plugin.

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