Introduction to Action Mailbox in Rails 6: Fundamentals and Real-World Applications Welcome to Action Mailbox Pro! In this episode, we cover the fundamentals of Action Mailbox, a feature introduced in Rails 6 that routes incoming emails for processing.

We'll discuss its workings, benefits, and real-life examples. Although no coding is included, you'll gain insight on integrating Action Mailbox into your application and leveraging your users' email habits for improved interaction and workflow.

00:00 Introduction to Action Mailbox

00:36 Understanding Action Mailbox

01:01 How Action Mailbox Processes Emails

02:20 Benefits of Using Action Mailbox

03:32 Real World Examples and Use Cases

03:45 Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, Rails developers and welcome to Action Mailbox Pro. In this video, I'll be covering the fundamentals of Action Mailbox, a powerful and flexible feature introduced in Rails 6. I'll cover the basics of what it is, how it works, and why you might want to use it in your application. This video will give you some background on Action Mailbox and some different ways you can integrate it into your application.

I'll be covering how it works, some benefits to using it, and some real life examples and use cases. We won't be doing any coding in this video, so if you're already familiar with Action Mailbox, feel free to head to the next video. To start, let's get some more background on what Action Mailbox is. Action Mailbox routes incoming emails to controller like mailboxes for processing, giving you a familiar and comfortable Rails way to process your inbound emails.

Action Mailbox also includes default integrations for XM, Mailgun, and Mailman. Postfix, Postmark, QMail, and Syngrid [00:01:00] with no additional configuration. Here's the overall flow of what happens when an inbound email is sent to your Action Mailbox application. The yellow represents your email servers provider or Ingress as Action Mailbox refers to it.

And the red represents your Rails application. Let's break down what's happening in each one of these steps in a little more detail. The process begins by sending an inbound email. Your email service provider will receive your inbound email and then forward the data to your Rails application. After processing and formatting the email, your email service provider will then send a webhook with the raw email data to your Rails application.

It's at this point where our Rails application takes over. Your application will receive the webhook. Authorize the request URL and then send the webhook data to the controller for your specific ingress. After we've received our inbound email data, we create a new inbound email record which will also enqueue a job for later routing and processing the mailbox.

[00:02:00] The inbound email record has an active storage attachment called raw email data that will be used to store the original email data we'll later use to process the email. And finally, the inbound email is routed to your application mailbox, which then routes the email to its specific mailbox for processing.

Here are some of the benefits to using ActionMailbox. It allows you to easily integrate email handling into your Rails application without the need for additional services. With ActionMailbox, you're not signing up for a new venture backed startup that could disappear in a couple of years. You're using battle tested and well maintained Rails code.

Need to ditch your email service provider after another price hike? With Action Mailbox, you only need to update a few config values instead of rewriting your entire application. It allows you to define custom logic to process emails, allowing for powerful and flexible workflows. Common tasks like PDF or CSV [00:03:00] imports can be handled through email and processed efficiently in the background instead of your users tying up your web server uploading that huge file.

Finally, it gives users an easy and intuitive way to interact with your application. Let's face it, if a user doesn't know how to use email, they probably don't know how to use your application. They're probably also using their email an exponential amount more than your application. Action Mailbox allows you to leverage the channels people are most comfortable and familiar with to improve their experience.

Here are a couple of real world examples you would be able to use with Action Mailbox. Support systems, feedback collection, and automated responses are just a few generated commands away. And that covers everything for the intro. Now that you have some more information on the background and fundamentals of Action Mailbox, let's get into creating some applications.