Adam Niedzielski

Programming is about people

Emails with "View in Browser" link in Node.js

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“View in Browser” link is a common feature of email campaign systems like MailChimp. It’s a really nice idea – when you code your shiny CSS-heavy emails you want to have a fallback for malfunctioning email clients.

But what if you want to implement this feature on your own? Read on to learn how to send emails in Node.js with “View in Browser” link and inlined CSS.

We will use Nodemailer for email transport and node-email-templates for rendering templates and inlining CSS styles. The code was tested under Node.js 5.7.1.

Let’s start with implementing just the email transport. Nodemailer has “callback-based” API while I prefer to use generator based flow control offered by co. That’s why we need Q to convert “callback-based” API to “promise-based” API which can be used by co.

send.js
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var co = require("co");
var nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
var Q = require("q");

function *send() {
  var transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    port: 1025
  });

  var rawSend = Q.nbind(transporter.sendMail, transporter);
  yield rawSend({
      from: '[email protected]',
      to: '[email protected]',
      subject: 'Test',
      text: 'Test123!'
  });
}

co(function* () {
  yield send();
}).catch(function (err) {
  console.error(err.stack);
});

We are using the default SMTP transport here. You can use MailCatcher for development, to quickly have something running. For production I recommend checking out other transports like nodemailer-mandrill-transport.

The next step is to use node-email-templates. I decided to use Jade for templating and Sass as CSS preprocessor:

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npm install --save jade
npm install --save node-sass

We have to implement renderContent function, create HTML template and add some CSS styles:

send.js
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// [...]

function *send() {
  var transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    port: 1025
  });

  var content = yield renderContent();

  var rawSend = Q.nbind(transporter.sendMail, transporter);
  yield rawSend({
      from: '[email protected]',
      to: '[email protected]',
      subject: 'Test',
      html: content.html
  });
}

function *renderContent() {
  var templateDir = path.join(__dirname, 'invitation');
  var invitation = new EmailTemplate(templateDir);
  var context = { userName: "Adam" };

  var render = Q.nbind(invitation.render, invitation);
  return yield render(context);
}

// [...]
invitation/html.jade
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h1 Hello
  span.name  #{userName}!
p This is some content for you
invitation/style.scss
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h1 {
  .name {
    color: red;
  }
}

Inside context object we pass values for interpolation in the template. Please also note that Sass styles are automatically compiled to CSS and inlined for us!

How are we going to implement “View in Browser” functionality? My approach is simple – store generated email content in MongoDB, assign it some long random identifier and serve this content via a web application.

Let’s start by creating a function which connects to MongoDB and inserts email content identified by the token (UUID). I’m hardcoding address of local MongoDB instance for the purpose of this example.

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function *send() {
  var transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    port: 1025
  });

  var token = uuid.v4();

  var content = yield renderContent();

  var rawSend = Q.nbind(transporter.sendMail, transporter);
  yield [rawSend({
      from: '[email protected]',
      to: '[email protected]',
      subject: 'Test',
      html: content.html
  }), saveContent(token, content)];
}

function *saveContent(token, content) {
  var connect = Q.nbind(MongoClient.connect, MongoClient);
  var db = yield connect("mongodb://localhost:27017/nodejs-email-demo");

  var collection = db.collection('emails');

  var insert = Q.nbind(collection.insertOne, collection);
  yield insert({
    token: token,
    content: content.html
  });

  db.close();
}

Please note that we are executing rawSend and saveContent concurrently, because we are passing array of promises to yield.

As the next step, let’s extract the code related to database communication to a separate module – db.js. We need find function which shares some code with save function so we extract to avoid duplicating the code.

send.js
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function *saveContent(token, content) {
  yield db.save(token, content.html);
}
db.js
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var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
var Q = require("q");

function *connect() {
  var conn = Q.nbind(MongoClient.connect, MongoClient);
  return yield conn("mongodb://localhost:27017/nodejs-email-demo");
}

module.exports = {
  save: function*(token, content) {
    var db = yield connect();
    var collection = db.collection("emails");

    var insert = Q.nbind(collection.insertOne, collection);
    yield insert({
      token: token,
      content: content
    });

    db.close();
  },

  find: function*(token) {
    var db = yield connect();
    var collection = db.collection("emails");

    var find = Q.nbind(collection.findOne, collection);
    var email = yield find({ token: token });

    db.close();
    return email;
  }
}

For our web application we will use koa with koa-router. Koa is based on generators and allows us to implement the functionality with only a couple lines of code:

app.js
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var koa = require('koa');
var app = koa();
var router = require('koa-router')();
var db = require("./db");

router.get('/emails/:id', function*() {
  var email = yield db.find(this.params.id);

  if (email) {
    this.body = email.content;
  }
});

app.use(router.routes()).use(router.allowedMethods());
app.listen(3000);

Please mind that in the real application, you will probably have a shared MongoDB connection and won’t connect from scratch for each incoming request.

The final step is to add the link to our web application inside the email template:

invitation/html.jade
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h1 Hello
  span.name  #{userName}!
p This is some content for you

a(href=viewInBrowserUrl) View in Browser
send.js
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function *renderContent(token) {
  var templateDir = path.join(__dirname, 'invitation');
  var invitation = new EmailTemplate(templateDir);
  var context = {
    userName: "Adam",
    viewInBrowserUrl: "http://localhost:3000/emails/" + token
  };

  var render = Q.nbind(invitation.render, invitation);
  return yield render(context);
}

If you launch the web application and MailCatcher:

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node app.js
mailcatcher

You should be able to send email with:

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node send.js

“View in Browser” link will show content of the email served by our web application.

You can check out the complete example on Github.

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