From DreamHost

Comment: Hmmm... - according to the ActionMailer API docs, you're not supposed to have to specify server_settings for :sendmail, instead your configuration options are only :location and :arguments (sendmail has its own configuration). Why would you have to specify all those other settings for it to work?

Response: I'm not sure that this is a complete answer to your comment, but here is a snippet from "Agile Web Development With Rails" (p. 568) that might shed some light on the issue.

"The :sendmail setting delegates mail delivery to your local system's sendmail program, which is assumed to be in /usr/sbin. This delivery mechanism is not particularly portable, because sendmail is not always installed in this directory on different operating systems. It also relies on your local sendmail supporting the -i and -t command options."

Old versions of tips

I'm moving previous versions of these tips to this page as they do not work with rails 2.0.

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To configure Action mailer to work with a dream host account add this configuration to your production.rb file.

# use ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings for Rails 2.0
ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = {
 :address  => "mail.{yourdomain}.com",
 :port  => 25, 
 :domain  => 'mail.{yourdomain}.com',
 :user_name  => "{email}@{yourdomain}.com",
 :password  => "{password}",
 :authentication  => :login
   } 

You can also use this when testing locally by adding this to your development.rb

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The above didn't work for me...but this did:

 ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :sendmail
 ActionMailer::Base.server_settings = {
       :address          => 'mail.myniftydomain.com',
       :port             => 25,
       :domain           => 'myniftydomain.com',
       :authentication   => :plain,
       :user_name        => 'm0000000',
       :password         => 'password'
 }
 ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true
 ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
 ActionMailer::Base.default_charset = 'utf-8'

Note: don't forget to include sub-domain in :address and :domain if applicable. Also set :user_name to the mailbox user code from dreamhost (i.e. m0000000) instead of the familiar name as this seems to be more reliable.