Email

The email package allows sending email from a Meteor app. To use it, add the package to your project by running in your terminal:

meteor add email

There are two ways on how to setup the package for sending e-mail.

First is to set MAIL_URL. The server reads from the MAIL_URL environment variable to determine how to send mail. The MAIL_URL should reference an SMTP server and use the form smtp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT or smtps://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT. The smtps:// form (the s is for “secure”) should be used if the mail server requires TLS/SSL (and does not use STARTTLS) and is most common on port 465. Connections which start unencrypted prior to being upgraded to TLS/SSL (using STARTTLS) typically use port 587 (and sometimes 25) and should use smtp://. For more information see the Nodemailer docs

Second, if you are using a one of the supported services you can setup the sending options in your app settings like this:

{
  "packages": {
    "email": {
      "service": "Mailgun",
      "user": "postmaster@meteor.com",
      "password": "superDuperPassword"
    }
  }
}

The package will take care of the rest.

If you use a supported service the package will try to match to supported service and use the stored settings instead. You can force this by switching protocol like smtp to the name of the service. Though you should only use this as a stop-gap measure and instead set the settings properly.

If neither option is set, Email.send outputs the message to standard output instead.

Package setting is only available since Email v2.2

You must provide the from option and at least one of to, cc, and bcc; all other options are optional.

Email.send only works on the server. Here is an example of how a client could use a server method call to send an email. (In an actual application, you’d need to be careful to limit the emails that a client could send, to prevent your server from being used as a relay by spammers.)

// Server: Define a method that the client can call.
Meteor.methods({
  sendEmail(to, from, subject, text) {
    // Make sure that all arguments are strings.
    check([to, from, subject, text], [String]);

    // Let other method calls from the same client start running, without
    // waiting for the email sending to complete.
    this.unblock();

    Email.send({ to, from, subject, text });
  }
});

// Client: Asynchronously send an email.
Meteor.call(
  'sendEmail',
  'Alice <alice@example.com>',
  'bob@example.com',
  'Hello from Meteor!',
  'This is a test of Email.send.'
);

sendAsync only works on the server. It has the same behavior as Email.send, but returns a Promise. If you defined Email.customTransport, the callAsync method returns the return value from the customTransport method or a Promise, if this method is async.

// Server: Define a method that the client can call.
Meteor.methods({
  sendEmail(to, from, subject, text) {
    // Make sure that all arguments are strings.
    check([to, from, subject, text], [String]);

    // Let other method calls from the same client start running, without
    // waiting for the email sending to complete.
    this.unblock();

    return Email.sendAsync({ to, from, subject, text }).catch(err => {
      // 
    });
  }
});

hookSend is a convenient hook if you want to: prevent sending certain emails, send emails via your own integration instead of the default one provided by Meteor, or do something else with the data. This is especially useful if you want to intercept emails sent by core packages like accounts-password or other packages where you can’t modify the email code.

The hook function will receive an object with the options for Nodemailer.

Email.customTransport is only available since Email v2.2

There are scenarios when you have your own transport set up, be it an SDK for your mailing service or something else. This is where customTransport comes in. If you set this function all sending events will be passed to it (after hookSend is run) with an object of the options passed into send function with addition of packageSettings key which will pass in package settings set in your app settings (if any). It is up to you what you do in that function as it will override the original sending function.

Here is a simple example with Mailgun:

import { Email } from 'meteor/email'
import { Log } from 'meteor/logging'
import Mailgun from 'mailgun-js'

Email.customTransport = (data) => {
  // `options.packageSettings` are settings from `Meteor.settings.packages.email`
  // The rest of the options are from Email.send options
  const mailgun = Mailgun({ apiKey: data.packageSettings.mailgun.privateKey, domain: 'mg.mygreatapp.com' })
  
  // Since the data object that we receive already includes the correct key names for sending
  // we can just pass it to the mailgun sending message.
  mailgun.messages().send(data, (error, body) => {
    if (error) Log.error(error)
    if (body) Log.info(body)
  })
}

Note that this also overrides the development display of messages in console so you might want to differentiate between production and development for setting this function.