title: Email confirmation in Rails without using any existing authentication gems/plugins
body: <p>I'm working on this alerting service in Rails. And really, all I need to do is, when a user signs up, send a confirmation email to the user. And upon confirmation from the user, activate the user. I tried playing around with Matt Hooks' Authlogic email activation tutorial, but its really leading nowhere. So , any ideas how I can do this with minimum fuss ?
  Thanks ! </p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>So how i got devise to do the job for me is :</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Install the gem. </p></li>
  <li><p>Create a migration for devise's confirmable fields. </p></li>
  <li><p>Specify </p>
  
  <p>devise :confirmable
  in your model.</p></li>
  <li><p>Create a confirm method in the relevant controller(and a route for that method) which would update the confirmed_at attribute of the relevant model.</p></li>
  <li>The devise generator creates a few views for you, one which is confirmation_instructions.html.erb. Customize the path there.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I used Rails 2.3.2 and I 've used this method along with Authlogic's authentication and it worked well. I do plan to switch to devise completely. </p>
  
  <p>In all honesty, I wanted to accept both answers (unfortunately I can't do that), but its just that the devise solution seemed a easier solution.</p>