Rails mailer without view

I found the way by experimentation :

mail(:to => email, :subject => 'we found the answer') do |format|
  format.text do
    render :text => '42 owns the World'
  end
end

This is also said in the Rails Guide : http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html at section 2.4

Much simpler, just use the body option :

def welcome(user)
  mail to:       user.email,
       from:     "\"John\" <[email protected]>",
       subject: 'Welcome in my site',
       body:    'Welcome, ...'
end

And if you plan to use html, don't forget to specify that with the content_type option which is by default text/plain.

content_type: "text/html"

So with body option rails skips the template rendering step.