Webiny Overview > Features

Mailer

Overview of the package used to send e-mails.

What You’ll Learn

How to use api-mailer to send e-mails
How to use api-mailer with basic configuration
How to use api-mailer with advanced configuration

About

Starting from 5.30.0 version of Webiny we have a mailer package (@webiny/api-mailer) via which you can send e-mails.

The package uses transports to send e-mails. The transport is an implementation of sending the e-mails, and we have few built-in ones.

Available Transports

Dummy Transport - does not send e-mails, just records them in an array which you can access later
SMTP Transport - sends e-mails with the use of nodemailer library

Dummy Transport

A transport which pretends to be sending e-mails.

It is used for testing and as a backup in case no other transport exists or is not configured.

SMTP Transport

A transport which sends e-mails via the nodemailer external link library. It requires credentials to be defined, which we will go through. If this transport fails to be created, it falls back to the Dummy Transport.

Basic Configuration via Environment Variables

The simplest, and most rudimentary, configuration is done via the environment variables:

Variables WEBINY_MAILER_HOST, WEBINY_MAILER_USER, WEBINY_MAILER_PASSWORD and WEBINY_MAILER_REPLY_TO must be defined for SMTP Transport to work.

The WEBINY_MAILER_FROM variable is an optional one.

When applying the variables we run them through the validation process, so if any are invalid (for example, you do not put e-mail in WEBINY_MAILER_FROM), the creation process of the transport will fail.

When configuring transport via the environment variables, that configuration is used for all tenants in the system.

Basic Configuration via Admin UI

Configuring SMTP Transport via the UI is the easiest way to configure the transport.

The “downside” is that, in multi-tenancy systems, you need to store configuration for each tenant. If you do not want to do that, use the configuration via environment variables.

Mailer Settings

(click to enlarge)

Configuration via the UI is not available until you have the WEBINY_MAILER_PASSWORD_SECRET environment variable set. Since we are storing the password in the database, we need to encrypt it. The WEBINY_MAILER_PASSWORD_SECRET is used as a secret in the crypto-js library’s AES algorithm.

Advanced Configuration via Code

The advanced configuration is done by creating your own SMTP Transport with custom config. You can use our createSmtpMailer method, you just need to pass the custom configuration.

When creating the transport via createTransport, you will get the settings and the context variables. The settings variable contains whatever was defined in either environment variables or the values which were stored via the Mailer Settings UI.

Custom Transport

You can create your own transport if you do not like ours. You just need to use the createTransport method which returns the transport.

Usage

For example, let’s say you want to send an e-mail when user creates an entry in the Person model. You would want to subscribe to the onEntryAfterCreate event and send an e-mail only when added entry to that certain model.