Jessica Chowdhury for Payload CMS

Posted on May 26, 2023 • Originally published at payloadcms.com

Payload + Nodemailer: Free and Extensible Email Integration

#webdev #typescript #email #payloadcms

Email is a necessary evil in our lives. We don’t love it, but we need it.

With Payload, you don't have to abandon what you're already familiar with. Stick to your trusty SMTP if you like to keep things simple. Or, if you're a fan of Gmail or Outlook, go ahead and integrate them with ease. You can even bring in other powerful email service tools like SendGrid, Resend, HubSpot and more.

Integrating email with Payload is free, flexible and highly extensible. No matter what kind of emails you need to send – from newsletters, transactional and marketing emails, to those crucial authentication emails – we've got you covered.

In this post, we’ll walk through the process of configuring email with Payload and cover everything you need to get up and running. Let’s dive in!

How it works

Payload utilizes Nodemailer to produce a versatile email transporter which can then be used anywhere in your application.

For those who are new to Nodemailer, it is a powerful module in the Node.js ecosystem that greatly simplifies the process of sending email. We recommend taking a look at the Nodemailer docs if you want to learn more.

If you have used Nodemailer before, this process will be familiar. Simply create a new transport and pass it to the email property in your payload.init() function.

Once you add your email configuration, you can send emails from anywhere in your application simply by calling Payload.sendEmail({}). Neat, huh?

Configuration

The email property takes the following options:

fromName - required
fromAddress - required
logMockCredentials - will output your credentials to the console on startup
transportOptions - pass in your options and let Payload create the transport for you
transport - manual create a transporter using nodemailer.createTransport({})

Important: You only need to use transportOptions OR transport in your email configuration. Not both.

There are two ways to create a Nodemailer-compatible transport:

Define your transportOptions and Payload do it for you
Manually configure a transport or import a separate package to do this for you

To get setup, navigate to where you are calling payload.init(), this is usually in `src/server.ts.

After adding your email options, your payload.init() should look something like this:

export const email = {
  fromName: 'Admin',
  fromAddress: 'admin@example.com',
  logMockCredentials: true,
  transportOptions: {},   
  transport: {},
}

const start = async (): Promise<void> => {
  await payload.init({
    secret: process.env.PAYLOAD_SECRET,
    mongoURL: process.env.MONGODB_URI,
    express: app,
    email,
  })

  app.listen(8000)
}

start()

Important: We always recommend storing sensitive data as environment variables and not directly in your code to prevent security vulnerabilities.

Mock email handler

If you do not provide a transport or transportOptions, Payload will initialize an ethereal capture service. Ethereal is a free email caching service which captures all outbound emails. Using this service can be really useful for testing emails when you’re working in a development environment.

To use this service, logMockCredentials must be set to true. This will output the ethereal credentials to your console after startup, you will then use these to login to ethereal.email and view any emails that are sent during development.

transportOptions

Pass any valid Nodemailer options to transportOptions and Payload will create the transporter for you.

You can use transportOptions to configure:

SMTP

export const email = {
  fromName: 'Admin',
  fromAddress: 'admin@example.com',
  transportOptions: { 
    host: process.env.SMTP_HOST,
    auth: {
      user: process.env.SMTP_USER,
      pass: process.env.SMTP_PASS
    },
    port: 587,
    secure: false,
  }
}

An email service

Nodemailer will automatically provide the connection details (host, port, etc) for several well known email services. For example if you want to use Gmail, you simply need to provide the service name like this:

export const email = {
  fromName: 'Admin',
  fromAddress: 'admin@example.com',
  transportOptions: {
    service: 'gmail',
    auth: {
      user: process.env.GMAIL_USER,
      pass: process.env.GMAIL_PASS,
    },
  }
}

An external transport, a nodemailer plugin or similar

import nodemailerSendgrid from 'nodemailer-sendgrid'

export const email = {
  fromName: 'Admin',
  fromAddress: 'admin@example.com',
  transportOptions: nodemailerSendgrid({
    apiKey: process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY,
  }),
}

Nodemailer has created packages that integrate popular email vendors for you, such as SendGrid:

transport

This option allows you to manually create a transport, this supports SMTP and email services.

You can make use of nodeMailer.createTransport({}) for support of well known email services and browse this list of options that you can define.

import nodemailer from 'nodemailer'
import payload from 'payload'

const transport = await nodemailer.createTransport({
  service: 'outlook',
  auth: {
    user: process.env.OUTLOOK_USER,
    pass: process.env.OUTLOOK_PASS,
  },
})

const email = {
  fromName: 'Admin',
  fromAddress: 'admin@example.com',
  logMockCredentials: true,
  // Passes your custom transport
  transport,
}

More examples of using nodeMailer.createTransport({}) can be found in the Nodemailer documentation.

Sending Email

Once you have configured your transporter, you can start sending emails from anywhere inside your Payload project by calling payload.sendEmail({}).

payload.sendEmail({}) takes properties of to, from, subject, and html:

import payload from 'payload'

payload.sendEmail({
  from: 'sender@example.com',
  to: 'receiver@example.com',
  subject: 'Message subject title',
  html: '<p>HTML based message</p>',
})

Dynamic Email Content

There are many ways to include data directly from your project into your emails. Whether it is using hooks, making API requests, fetching data from globals or anything else you can think of.

For example, sending order details when there is a new submission to the Orders collection:

import payload from 'payload'
import type { CollectionConfig } from 'payload/types'

const Orders: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: 'orders',
  hooks: {
    afterChange: [
      ({ doc, operation, req }) => {
        const { customerEmail, items, total } = doc
        if (operation === 'create') {
          req.payload.sendEmail({
            to: customerEmail,
            from: 'sender@example.com',
            subject: 'Welcome To Payload',
            html: `<h1>Thank you for your order!</h1>
              <p>Here is your order summary:</p>
              <ul>
                ${items.map(item => `<li>${item.name} - ${item.price}</li>`)}
              </ul>
              <p>Total: ${total}</p>
            `,
          })
        }
      },
    ],
  },
  fields: [],
}

export default Orders

Automatically trigger email dispatch

Payload’s collection and field hooks allow you to define specific conditions which will trigger an email to be sent.

Like sending an email every time you receive a newsletter signup:

import payload from 'payload'
import type { CollectionConfig } from 'payload/types'

const NewsletterSignups: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: 'newsletter-signups',
  hooks: {
    afterChange: [
      ({ doc, operation, req }) => {
        if (operation === 'create') {
          req.payload.sendEmail({
            to: doc.email,
            from: 'sender@example.com',
            subject: 'You have joined our newsletter list!',
            html: '<p>Thanks for signing up</p>',
          })
        }
      },
    ],
  },
  fields: [],
}

export default NewsletterSignups

Or sending a welcome email to new users:

import payload from 'payload'
import type { CollectionConfig } from 'payload/types'

const Users: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: 'users',
  auth: true,
  hooks: {
    afterChange: [
      ({ doc, operation }) => {
        if (operation === 'create') {
          payload.sendEmail({
            to: doc.email,
            from: 'sender@example.com',
            subject: 'Welcome To Payload',
            html: '<b>Hey there!</b><br/>Welcome to Payload!',
          })
        }
      },
    ],
  },
  fields: [],
}

export default Users

Authentication Emails

Payload makes auth-enabled collections super simple to integrate with email by handling forgotPassword and verify for you.

Each auth-enabled collection has forgotPassword and verify options that you can pass generateEmailSubject and generateEmailHTML functions to. The function accepts one argument containing { req, token, user }.

import payload from 'payload'
import type { CollectionConfig } from 'payload/types'

const Users: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: 'users',
  auth: {
    verify: {
      generateEmailSubject: () => 'Verify your email',
      generateEmailHTML:  ({ token }) => `<p>Verify your account here ${process.env.PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_SITE_URL}/verify?token=${token}.</p>`,
    },
    forgotPassword: {
      generateEmailSubject: () => 'Reset your password',
      generateEmailHTML: ({ token }) => `<p>Reset your password here ${process.env.PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_SITE_URL}/reset-password?token=${token}.</p>`,
      },
    },
  },
  fields: [],
}

export default Users

Templates

Payload doesn't ship a default HTML templating engine, so you are free to add whatever suits you best.

Make your email templates highly dynamic by using Handlebars, a templating language that combines HTML, plain text and expressions. The expressions are included in the html template surrounded by double curly braces.

<table border="0" width="100%">
  <tbody>
      <td>
        <!-- HEADLINE -->
        <h1>{{headline}}</h1>
      </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <!-- CONTENT -->
        {{{content}}}
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Here is a simple but powerful function that ties everything together in one function:

import fs from 'fs'
import Handlebars from 'handlebars'
import inlineCSS from 'inline-css'
import path from 'path'
import payload from 'payload'

const template = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'template.html'), 'utf8')
const getHTML = Handlebars.compile(template)

export const sendEmailWithTemplate = async (args): Promise<any> => {
  const { from, to, subject, data } = args

  const templateData = {
    ...data,
    apiURL: process.env.PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_SERVER_URL,
    siteURL: process.env.PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_SITE_URL,
  }
  const preInlinedCSS = getHTML(templateData)

  const html = await inlineCSS(preInlinedCSS, {
    url: ' ',
    removeStyleTags: false,
  })

  await payload.sendEmail({
    from,
    to,
    subject,
    html,
  })

  return null
}

The template.html file that is being used in sendEmailWithTemplate can be any HTML file of your choice. You can find this template in our email example, feel free to use this as a starter template and add your own custom CSS.

Example

We have an example repo where you can see these code snippets being used and try them out in real time.

Wrap Up

Payload aims to provide developers with a powerful but simple solution when it comes to configuring and managing email. By harnessing the capabilities of Nodemailer, we can offer flexibility in choosing email providers and accommodate various email needs.

I hope this post provides value and gives you a good introduction to email integration with Payload.

Always feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback!

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