please-send-emails

Please Send Emails

This parses the csv file and send emails like happy birthday or anniversary accordingly.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following items setup on your system:

• node
• npm or yarn
• Email account, of course!

Events/Templates

Currently following events and their templates are supported:

• event: EVENT_TYPES.BIRTHDAY, template: happy-birthday.html

• event: EVENT_TYPES.ANNIVERSARY, template: happy-anniversary.html

• event: EVENT_TYPES.GIFT_SELECTION_BIRTHDAY, template: gift-selection-birthday.html

  • by default, this email is sent 20 days before the birthday

• event: EVENT_TYPES.GIFT_SELECTION_ANNIVERSARY, template: gift-selection-anniversary.html

  • by default, this email is sent 20 days before the anniversary date

How to Setup?

• Take a clone of this repository:

  git clone https://github.com/mukarramishaq/please-send-emails.git
  

• Rename .env.sample file to .env and update the values to that of yours.

• Install dependencies:

  yarn install #or npm install
  

• Run it to send today's pending emails:

  yarn please-send-emails
  

How to update users data

Update Users in src/assets/csvs/users.csv

• This file has 4 columns
  • name full name in initial letters in capital
  • email email address of the user
  • birth_date date of birth in yyyy-mm-dd format only
  • joining_date date of joining in yyyy-mm-dd format only
• update this file or replace it with yours but with similar structure

How to update email templates or Events

Update email templates in src/assets/email-templates/ folder.

These are Handlebar templates. All the variables are in handlebars format. Update the content as you like. But if the updated template has new variables then you need to update its context object:

• Update the template context object (i.e an object that contains all variables data which are being used in the template) in file src/context.ts under object contextHandlers. In, this contextHandlers object, key is value from enum EVENT_TYPES and value is a function. Whatever this function will return will be used as context for the email template of that specific event.

How to add new email templates

Following are the steps:

• Add HTML template to src/assets/email-templates/ folder under some unique name

• Register the event of this template in src/types.ts under EVENT_TYPES enum

• Register this email template in src/emailTemplatesRegister.ts by adding a new object of TemplateRegistry.

Note: attachments in TemplateRegistery is an array of Attachment objects. And filename and path attributes of Attachment can use context data. So, we can dynamically decide what attachment to send with email.

Note: Every element which can use context data must use Handlebars notation to access the context attributes. e.g. "Happy {{whatTh}} Anniversary". Here whatTh will be an attribute of context object

• Register the context creator function of this template in file src/context.ts under object contextHandlers. In, this contextHandlers object, key is value from enum EVENT_TYPES and value is a function. Whatever this function will return will be used as context for the email template of that specific event.

Setup for SMTP Configurations

This repository use nodemailer to send emails through SMTP transporter. Currently, this repository supports two types of authentication for SMTP:

• LOGIN
  • It uses Email Address and Password to authenticate. It is less secure and for gmail, you'll have to allow less secure apps beforehand.
• OAUTH2
  • It uses Client ID, Client Secret and Refresh Token to authenticate

Following ENV variables are necessary irrespective of the authentication type:

• SMTP_HOST e.g for gmail its value is smtp.gmail.com.
• SMTP_PORT e.g 465 for secure and 587 for not secure.
• SMTP_AUTH_TYPE It can have one of the following values:
  • LOGIN
  • OAUTH2
• SMTP_AUTH_USER this is an email address through this nodemailer will authenticate and send emails

Now if your authentication type is LOGIN, uncomment and update the values of the following ENV variables:

• SMTP_AUTH_LOGIN_PASS This is password to email address

And if your authentication type is OAUTH2, uncomment and update the values of the following ENV variables:

• SMTP_AUTH_OAUTH2_CLIENT_ID
• SMTP_AUTH_OAUTH2_CLIENT_SECRET
• SMTP_AUTH_OAUTH2_REFRESH_TOKEN

Now to configure the sender and recipients name and emails, uncomment and update the following ENV variables:

• EMAIL_FROM i.e sender of this email notification
• EMAIL_TO a comma-separated list of recipients emails

There are two more optional variables EMAIL_CC and EMAIL_BCC to configure a list of recipients as CC or BCC. Both these variables accept a comma-separated list of emails.