Rails ActionMailer - format sender and recipient name/email address

Question

If you are taking user input for name and email, then unless you very carefully validate or escape the name and email, you can end up with an invalid From header by simply concatenating strings. Here is a safe way:

require 'mail'
address = Mail::Address.new email # ex: "[email protected]"
address.display_name = name.dup   # ex: "John Doe"
# Set the From or Reply-To header to the following:
address.format # returns "John Doe <[email protected]>"

@recipients   = "\"#{user.name}\" <#{user.email}>"
@from         = "\"MyCompany\" <[email protected]>"

In rails3 I place the following in each environment. i.e. production.rb

ActionMailer::Base.default :from => "Company Name <[email protected]>"

Placing quotations around the company name did not work for me in Rails3.

within Rails 2.3.3 a bug within the ActionMailer was introduced. You can see the ticket over here Ticket #2340. It's resolved in 2-3-stable and master so it will be fixed in 3.x and 2.3.6.

For fixing the problem within 2.3.* you can use the code provided within the ticket comments:

module ActionMailer
  class Base
    def perform_delivery_smtp(mail)
      destinations = mail.destinations
      mail.ready_to_send
      sender = (mail['return-path'] && mail['return-path'].spec) || Array(mail.from).first

      smtp = Net::SMTP.new(smtp_settings[:address], smtp_settings[:port])
      smtp.enable_starttls_auto if smtp_settings[:enable_starttls_auto] && smtp.respond_to?(:enable_starttls_auto)
      smtp.start(smtp_settings[:domain], smtp_settings[:user_name], smtp_settings[:password],
                 smtp_settings[:authentication]) do |smtp|
        smtp.sendmail(mail.encoded, sender, destinations)
      end
    end
  end
end