Actionmailer, timeouts and resume if error?

Rails 2.3.5

I've been adding an email system to a 'tickets' type application. This morning the email server wend down for a few minutes and I noticed (at least in development mode) Rails will just halt executing and come back with a timeout error.

On the user side, it looks like there was no result to the action they just took (new ticket created, edited, commented开发者_C百科 on, completed, etc).

1) Is there some method to use continue after an actionmailer error like VB's 'on error resume next' - so that the app just doesn't stop in process for the user because there was a problem sending a notifier email ?

2) In the controller methods, I'm sending the email and then performing the render/redirects. Is it possible to complete the ticket action taken and get the user to the new/next page before the email is sent? Like the user clicks 'complete' and the complete action sets a flash msg and redirects to the index page, AND THEM actionmailer fires?

I would strongly suggest looking into something like DelayedJob, or Resque to hand off from your application to process the emails in the background - that way the end user isn't waiting for the process to completed and you can then handle retries etc in the background.