Rails 3 mailer not working and not logging any errors - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have tried all kinds of configurations but still I can't send an email in my development environment from rails.
I installed mailutils to try this from the command line and it worked, I received the email (in spam of course): echo test | mail -s Subject user#example.com
Here's my config:
# Don't care if the mailer can't send
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true # still no logs about emails
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true # I can't believe I have to add this option. Does it even exist? I found it on google.
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "gmail.com",
:authentication => :login,
:user_name => "some_user#gmail.com",
:password => "abc123",
}
And here's the code in the mailer:
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
default :from => "root#ubuntu"
def test_email
Rails.logger.debug 'test_email'
mail(:to => 'user#example.com', :subject => "testing rails")
end
end
The controller:
class PagesController < ApplicationController
def home
UserMailer.test_email
end
end
development.log:
[2012-03-01 18:26:45.859] DEBUG [bb44dee806d73eb60ab3ae16297f5c02] [127.0.0.1] [GET] [http://myapp:3000/] test_email
[2012-03-01 18:26:45.888] INFO [bb44dee806d73eb60ab3ae16297f5c02] [127.0.0.1] [GET] [http://myapp:3000/] Rendered user_mailer/test_email (1.6ms)
[2012-03-01 18:26:45.898] INFO [bb44dee806d73eb60ab3ae16297f5c02] [127.0.0.1] [GET] [http://myapp:3000/] Rendered pages/home.html.erb within layouts/application (1.1ms)
[2012-03-01 18:26:46.815] INFO [bb44dee806d73eb60ab3ae16297f5c02] [127.0.0.1] [GET] [http://myapp:3000/] Completed 200 OK in 455ms (Views: 112.4ms)
I also tried using the console:
root#ubuntu:/srv/www/myapp# rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.1)
irb(main):001:0> UserMailer.test_email
=> #<Mail::Message:32110400, Multipart: false, Headers: <To: user#example.com>, <Subject: testing rails>, <Mime-Version: 1.0>, <Content-Type: text/html>>

Answer 1

UserMailer.test_email
Just creates a Mail::Message object. To actually send an email you need to do
UserMailer.test_email.deliver
(or starting with rails 4.2 deliver_now / deliver_later)

Answer 2

Regarding logging errors:
Just figured out by tinkering that a bang method counterpart exists for deliver, which throws an exception. Can be pretty useful to check if you just misspelled your username or password, or you just have some misconfigured settings.
UserMailer.test_email.deliver!

Answer 3

An updated answer for Rails 4.2 would be:
UserMailer.test_email.deliver_now!
The exclamatory mark is to raise an exception if there are any errors.

Answer 4

If you suspect it's your settings, try taking out the :domain. It worked for me a while ago.( Net::SMTPAuthenticationError in rails 3.1.0.rc5 when connecting to gmail )
But I don't see a :body option in the mail function. Perhaps that's the issue. Try sending it from rails console and see what happens. http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html#method-i-mail