Rails and Gmail - Reply-To function not working as hoped

In my rails app I have a contact form that lets users send an email to my gmail account.

Problem 1

I'm using the same gmail account to send the emails as I'm using to receive them, and thus when I click the 'reply' button, gmail sets-up a new email to myself....

My mailer looks like this:

class Notification < ActionMailer::Base

  default :to => ENV['GMAIL_USER']

  def hello(contact)    
   mail(
    :from => contact[:email],
    :return_path => contact[:email],
    :subject => "[My Website] << #{contact[:subject]}", 
    :body => contact[:body] )
  end
end

I was under the impression that setting :return_path => contact开发者_如何学Python[:email] would ensure that gmail would know who to send the reply to.... Obviously I'm wrong there. Anyone know how to fix this?

Problem 2

Most action_mailer tutorials out there would have me set up my mail method using :from => contact.email as opposed to :from => contact[:email] like so:

  def hello(contact)
      @contact = contact    
      mail(
           :from => contact.email,
           :return_path => contact.email,
           :subject => "[My Website] << #{contact.subject}",
           :body => contact.body
           )
  end

But when I do it this way, I get the following error message:

undefined method `email' for #<ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess:0xdde82f0>

Anyone know what the recommended approach isn't working for me.

Appendage

FWIW, in-case it helps, my contact model extends a tabless active_record model as I don't want to use the database but do want to have valiations so it looks like this:

#contact.rb
class Contact < Tabless
  column :name,          :string
  column :email,         :string
  column :body,          :text
  column :subject,       :string      
  # validations go here
end

# tabless.rb
class Tabless < ActiveRecord::Base

  # create an array of columns
  def self.columns()
    @columns ||= [];
  end

  # add new column to columns array
  def self.column(name, sql_type = nil, default = nil, null = true)
    columns << ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column.new(name.to_s,
    default,
    sql_type.to_s,
    null)
  end

  # override the save method to prevent exceptions
  def save(validate = true)
    validate ? valid? : true
  end
end

Maybe I'm missing something but can't you just use :reply_to?

mail(
 :from => contact[:email],
 :reply_to => contact[:email],
 :subject => "[My Website] << #{contact[:subject]}", 
 :body => contact[:body] )

And any way you can get the email as a string should be fine. .email isn't a valid method for a Hash so it won't work in your example. The other examples you've seen are probably assuming you're working with a contact model. If contact[:email] gets you an email address then it shouldn't be a problem.

I've managed to fix this by creating another gmail account and using that one to send the emails. Now when I hit the reply button, it sets-up an email to the actual sender

This link explains helped me understand it

The symbol for the e-mail Reply-To header is :'reply-to'. To the original question, this should work:

mail(
:from => contact[:email],
:'reply-to'=> contact[:email],
:subject => "[My Website] << #{contact[:subject]}", 
:body => contact[:body] )

I ran into this situation recently myself with Gmail rewriting the email's From header. I blogged about the solution today at http://blog.rietta.com/2012/01/rails-gmail-reply-to-on-contact-form.html.

For me it is easy to respond to an e-mail either with Apple Mail or Google Apps itself. So the reply-header seems to be transmitted correctly by Google's SMTP server.

I hope this helps someone avoid this little catch :-)