IBM's jump to supply Web 2.0 goodies

I was just wondering how come IBM did not start building tools around web 2.0 productivity yet. There you go, now they are. IBM providing tools for mashup building and collaboration. How should all these online Web 2.0 companies who do the same thing and their bread and butter is dependent on that.
It should be interesting to see how IBM's push for this piece works out. Only thing that is making me worry is that they are bringing Lotus name back in the limelight. I hated Lotus applications, including their email client, lamest email client I have ever seen including the user interface. Their Lotus domino server did not go anywhere. Not sure their intention of pushing Lotus name with Web2.0 wares they are coming up with.
One interesting thing that these big players will do is to bring enterprise applications together with slick Web 2.0 applications, which will drive towards Enterprise 2.0.

Rails ActionMailer to use Gmail as SMTP relay

Lot of times we run into a situation, where we do not have sendmail available to test emails because of you are not working on a unix environment, which has sendmail support. The only other option you are left with is SMTP email relay and it gets hard again when you do not have SMTP server available. Best option is to use popular email applications like Gmail to send emails. Gmail will not let you send email directly by specifying basic SMTP auth settings in your rails application. It needs to be more secured.

Following blog post from Anatol Pomozov makes it as a slam dunk. This enables all gmailers to have a capability to send emails from their Rails application.

Another alternative is to setup your own SMTP server. You can try msmtp