Supermail mailto links

Last week I released Supermail, a gem that makes working with emails in Rails much more intuitive by using a much simpler abstraction. Something I love about simpler abstractions is they often lead to pleasant discoveries, in my case creating mailto links with an instance of an email. This week I had the revelation I could use those email objects to generate mailto links.

Generating support emails

The Beautiful Ruby checkout flow has a “cancel” state where I’m assuming the person trying to buy the Phlex on Rails video course ran into problems checking out. Instead of dumping them off into a dead-end, I give them an option to email me to get help. Here’s what that looks like in Supermail.

# ./app/emails/support_email.rb
class SupportEmail < ApplicationEmail
  def initialize(checkout_session:)
    @checkout_session = checkout_session
  end

  def to = from
  def subject = "Payment issue on Beautiful Ruby"
  def body = <<~BODY
    Hi,

    I had trouble completing my payment.

    Here's the checkout session ID: #{@checkout_session.id}

  BODY
end

# Then from your views...
<%= link_to SupportEmail.new(checkout_session: @checkout_session).mailto, "Get help with your payment" %>

The @checkout_session is an instance of a Stripe::Checkout::Session object from the Stripe Gem.

Generating mailto links

Here’s where the power of this simple abstraction lands: I can use it to generate mailto links that launch the users’ email clients with an instance of an email.

<%= link_to SupportEmail.new(checkout_session: @checkout_session).mailto, "Get help with your payment" %>

The HTML it generates for the link looks like this:

<a href="mailto:beautifulruby@example.com?subject=Payment%20issue%20on%20Beautiful%20Ruby&body=Hi%0A%0AI%20had%20trouble%20completing%20my%20payment.%0A%0AHere's%20the%20checkout%20session%20ID:%20%7B%40checkout_session.id%7D">Email Beautiful Ruby</a>

This instructs the user’s browser to launch their email client. On my machine the message looks like this:

The customer hits “Send” and boom, I get to connect with the person on a human level and work out the problem with payment processing.