Sending mail with Rails 3 in development environment

Well I have resolved the issue, but quite why this works and the other methods did not, I don’t know.

The solution was to create an initialiser in config/initialisers/setup_mail.rb containing the following

if Rails.env != 'test'
  email_settings = YAML::load(File.open("#{Rails.root.to_s}/config/email.yml"))
  ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = email_settings[Rails.env] unless email_settings[Rails.env].nil?
end

I then added config/email.yml containing the details of the dev and production email accounts

development:
  :address: smtp.gmail.com
  :port: 587
  :authentication: plain
  :user_name: xxx
  :password: yyy
  :enable_starttls_auto: true
production:
  :address: smtp.gmail.com
  :port: 587
  :authentication: plain
  :user_name: xxx
  :password: yyy
  :enable_starttls_auto: true

Like I say, no idea why, but this seemed to do the trick. Thanks all for the pointers