nodemailer
Advanced tools
Nodemailer is a module for Node.js applications to allow easy email sending. It supports various transport methods and has a simple setup process for sending emails.
Send Emails
This feature allows you to send emails using Nodemailer. The code sample shows how to set up a transporter using Gmail, define mail options, and send an email.
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
service: 'gmail',
auth: {
user: 'your.email@example.com',
pass: 'yourpassword'
}
});
let mailOptions = {
from: 'your.email@example.com',
to: 'recipient@example.com',
subject: 'Test Email Subject',
text: 'Hello world?',
html: '<b>Hello world?</b>'
};
transporter.sendMail(mailOptions, function(error, info){
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
console.log('Email sent: ' + info.response);
}
});HTML Email Content
Nodemailer allows you to send HTML content in your emails. The code sample demonstrates how to send an email with HTML content.
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
// transport configuration
});
let mailOptions = {
from: 'your.email@example.com',
to: 'recipient@example.com',
subject: 'HTML Email',
html: '<h1>Welcome</h1><p>That was easy!</p>'
};
transporter.sendMail(mailOptions, function(error, info){
// callback
});Attachments
Nodemailer supports sending attachments in emails. The code sample shows how to attach a file to an email.
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
// transport configuration
});
let mailOptions = {
from: 'your.email@example.com',
to: 'recipient@example.com',
subject: 'Attachment',
text: 'Please find the attachment.',
attachments: [
{
filename: 'file.txt',
path: '/path/to/file.txt'
}
]
};
transporter.sendMail(mailOptions, function(error, info){
// callback
});Custom Transport Methods
Nodemailer allows the use of custom transport methods for sending emails. The code sample illustrates how to use a custom transport plugin.
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
const customTransport = require('my-custom-transport');
let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport(customTransport({
// custom transport options
}));
// send mail with defined transport object
transporter.sendMail({
// mail options
}, function(error, info){
// callback
});A simple Node.js module for Mailgun. Mailgun-js is designed to work with the Mailgun API for sending, receiving, and tracking emails. It's similar to Nodemailer in functionality but is specifically tailored for Mailgun's service.
The official Node.js client library for interacting with the Postmark API. This package is intended for sending emails through Postmark's transactional email service. Unlike Nodemailer, which is more generic, Postmark is focused on providing a robust service for transactional emails.
Amazon Web Services SDK for JavaScript in Node.js. It includes support for SES (Simple Email Service), which can be used to send emails. While Nodemailer is a standalone package for email, aws-sdk is a comprehensive cloud services SDK that includes email sending capabilities among many other AWS services.
Nodemailer is an easy to use module to send e-mails with Node.JS (using SMTP or sendmail) and it's Unicode friendly - You can use any characters you like ✔
Install through NPM
npm install nodemailer
or download ZIP archive.
The source for Nodemailer is available at GitHub.
Nodemailer is fully compatible with Node.js versions 0.3.x, 0.4.x and 0.5.x on *nix and 0.5.x on Windows
nodemailer.send_mail(mail_params, callback)
Where
Simple use case to send a HTML e-mail with plaintext alternative
var nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
// one time action to set up SMTP information
nodemailer.SMTP = {
host: 'smtp.example.com'
}
// send an e-mail
nodemailer.send_mail(
// e-mail options
{
sender: 'me@example.com',
to:'you@example.com',
subject:'Hello!',
html: '<p><b>Hi,</b> how are you doing?</p>',
body:'Hi, how are you doing?'
},
// callback function
function(error, success){
console.log('Message ' + success ? 'sent' : 'failed');
}
);
The callback function gets two parameters - error and success. If there's an error, then sending failed and you should check where's the problem. If there's no error value but success is not true then the server wasn't able to process the message correctly. Probably there was timeout while processing the message etc - in this case you should re-schedule sending this e-mail. If success is true then the message was sent successfully.
See examples/example_smtp.js for a complete example.
Before sending any e-mails you need to set up a transfer method for delivering the messages.
To do this you need to define a properties object for a specific transfer method. Setup only one of these methods since only the first one defined will be used.
Use SMTP as the transfer method with the following setup
nodemailer.SMTP = {
host: 'smtp.example.com', // required
port: 25, // optional, defaults to 25 or 465
use_authentication: false, // optional, false by default
user: '', // used only when use_authentication is true
pass: '' // used only when use_authentication is true
}
Use Amazon SES as the transfer method with the following setup
nodemailer.SES = {
AWSAccessKeyID: 'ACCESSKEY', // required
AWSSecretKey: 'SECRETKEY', // required
ServiceUrl: 'https://email.us-east-1.amazonaws.com', // optional
}
Use sendmail as the transfer method with the following setup
nodemailer.sendmail = true;
or
nodemailer.sendmail = '/path/to/sendmail';
If you want to use SSL (not TLS/STARTTLS, just SSL), you need to set the ssl parameter to true.
nodemailer.SMTP = {
host: 'smtp.gmail.com',
port: 465,
ssl: true,
use_authentication: true,
user: 'my.username@gmail.com',
pass: 'my.password'
}
If you want to use TLS/STARTTLS (port 587), leave ssl to false or do not set it, encryption will be started automatically when needed.
nodemailer.SMTP = {
host: 'smtp.gmail.com',
port: 587,
ssl: false,
use_authentication: true,
user: 'my.username@gmail.com',
pass: 'my.password'
}
The following are the possible fields of an e-mail message:
sender@server.com or formatted Sender Name <sender@server.com>To: fieldCc: fieldBcc: fieldReply-To: fieldfilename and contents. Property contents can either be a String or a Buffer (for binary data). filename is the name of the attachment.There's an optional extra field headers which holds custom header values in the form of {key: value}. These values will not overwrite any existing header but will be appended to the list.
mail_data = {
sender:'me@example.com',
to:'you@example.com',
....
headers: {
'X-My-Custom-Header-Value': 'Visit www.example.com for more info!'
}
}
For debugging set debug to true - then all the data passed between the client and the server will be output to console.
All the e-mail addresses can be plain e-mail address
username@example.com
or with formatted name (includes unicode support)
'Ноде Майлер' <username@example.com>
To, Cc and Bcc fields accept comma separated list of e-mails. Formatting can be mixed.
username@example.com, 'Ноде Майлер' <username@example.com>, "Name, User" <username@example.com>
Message body in HTML format can be set with the message field html. If property html has contents but plain text alternative body has not (is left to empty), then existing text from the html version is also used in the plaintext version (without the html formatting).
The charset for html is UTF-8.
nodemailer.send_mail({
...
html: '<p>hello world!<br/>хелло ворлд!</p>'
});
An e-mail message can include one or several attachments. Attachments can be set with the message field attachments which accepts a list of attachment objects.
An attachment object primarly consists of two properties - filename which is the name of the file (not a filepath to an actual file on disk etc.) that will be reported to the receiver as the attachments name; and contents to hold the data in a String or Buffer format.
There's an additional property cid which can be used for embedding images in a HTML message.
Property filename is unicode safe.
var attachment_list = [
{
'filename': 'attachment1.txt',
'contents': 'contents for attachment1.txt'
},
{
'filename': 'аттачмент2.bin',
'contents': new Buffer('binary contents', 'binary');
}
];
nodemailer.send_mail({
...
attachments: attachment_list
});
Attachments can be used as embedded images in the HTML body. To use this feature, you need to set additional property
of the attachment - cid (unique identifier of the file) which is a reference to the attachment file.
The same cid value must be used as the image URL in HTML (using cid: as the URL protocol, see example below).
NB! the cid value should be as unique as possible!
var cid_value = Date.now() + '.image.jpg';
var html = 'Embedded image: <img src="cid:' + cid_value + '" />';
var attachments = [{
filename: 'image.png',
contents: IMAGE_CONTENTS,
cid: cid_value
}];
Use Nodemailer Issue tracker to report additional shortcomings, bugs, feature requests etc.
Currently the only allowed charset is UTF-8. This is probably not going to change.
SMTP connections are not shared - if you want to send several e-mails to the same domain in a row, then for every mail a new connection is created and closed afterwards. Together with TLS negotiation this can turn out to be pretty slow. Nodemailer is not the best choice for spamming!
Do not use large attachments as the attachment contents are read into memory and the final message body is combined into one large string before sending.
See Nodemailer/contributors for a live list
Nodemailer is licensed under MIT license. Basically you can do whatever you want to with it.
FAQs
Easy as cake e-mail sending from your Node.js applications
The npm package nodemailer receives a total of 3,270,001 weekly downloads. As such, nodemailer popularity was classified as popular.
We found that nodemailer demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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