Improving your Rails mailers with `email_address_with_name`

In almost all email programs, you can add a display name before your email address like so:

To: Matt Swanson <[e-mail]>

It’s a small touch, but it is a more human-readable way of addressing an email. Rails provides a helper utility to format email addresses in this style without resorting to manual string manipulation.

Usage

Use email_address_with_name to add a name in-front on an email address in a standard way

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("[e-mail]", "Matt Swanson")
=> "Matt Swanson <[e-mail]>"

This helper is available in all Rails mailers.

class UserMailer < ApplicationMailer
  default from: '[e-mail]'

  def welcome_email
    @user = params[:user]

    mail(
      to: email_address_with_name(@user.email, @user.display_name),
      subject: 'You have a new message'
    )
  end
end

Options

This helper handles nil gracefully as well.

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("[e-mail]", nil)
=> "[e-mail]"

And it handles escaping characters automatically:

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("[e-mail]", "Michael J. Scott")
=> "\"Michael J. Scott\" <[e-mail]>"

ActionMailer::Base.email_address_with_name("[e-mail]", 'John "Chip" Smith')
=> "\"John \\\"Chip\\\" Smith\" <[e-mail]>"

Additional Resources

Rails API: ActionMailer::Base#email_address_with_name

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Comments

[Frederik Ring]

This is only tangential, but do you know if this kind of email address format is somehow specified / named? I was recently looking for libraries that would handle such addresses for me (outside of Rails) and had to come up with my own version. I still have the suspicion though I just don't know the proper name.