16.1. Setup

By default, Rails will try to send email via SMTP (port 25) of localhost. If you are running Rails on a host that has an SMTP daemon running and it accepts SMTP email locally, you don’t have to do anything else in order to send mail. If you don’t have SMTP available on localhost, you have to decide how your system will send email.

When not using SMTP directly, the main options are to use sendmail or to give Rails information on how to connect to an external mail server. Most organizations have SMTP servers available for this type of use, although it’s worth noting that because of abuse many hosting providers have stopped offering shared SMTP service.