The Erlang SMTP client and server library.
Provide a generic Erlang SMTP server framework that can be extended via callback modules in the OTP style. A pure Erlang SMTP client is also included. The goal is to make it easy to send and receive email in Erlang without the hassle of POP/IMAP. This is not a complete mailserver - although it includes most of the parts you'd need to build one.
The SMTP server/client supports PLAIN, LOGIN, CRAM-MD5 authentication as well as STARTTLS and SSL (port 465).
Also included is a MIME encoder/decoder, sorta according to RFC204{5,6,7}.
IPv6 is also supported (at least serverside).
SMTP server uses ranch as socket acceptor. It can use Ranch 1.8+, as well as 2.x.
I (Vagabond) have had a simple gen_smtp based SMTP server receiving and parsing copies of all my email for several months and its been able to handle over 100 thousand emails without leaking any RAM or crashing the erlang virtual machine.
If you'd like to share your usage of gen_smtp, please submit a PR to this README.md
.
Here's an example usage of the client:
gen_smtp_client:send({"whatever@test.com", ["andrew@hijacked.us"],
"Subject: testing\r\nFrom: Andrew Thompson <andrew@hijacked.us>\r\nTo: Some Dude <foo@bar.com>\r\n\r\nThis is the email body"},
[{relay, "smtp.gmail.com"}, {username, "me@gmail.com"}, {password, "mypassword"}]).
The From and To addresses will be wrapped in <>
if they aren't already,
TLS will be auto-negotiated if available (unless you pass {tls, never}
) and
authentication will by attempted by default since a username/password were
specified ({auth, never}
overrides this).
If you want to mandate tls or auth, you can pass {tls, always}
or {auth, always}
as one of the options. You can specify an alternate port with {port, 2525}
(default is 25) or you can indicate that the server is listening for SSL
connections using {ssl, true}
(port defaults to 465 with this option).
send(Email, Options)
send(Email, Options, Callback)
send_blocking(Email, Options)
The send
method variants send/2, send/3, send_blocking/2
take an Options
argument.
Options
must be a proplist with the following valid values:
"smtp.gmail.com"
"me@gmail.com"
"mypassword"
if_available
, always
, and never
. Defaults to if_available
. If your smtp relay requires authentication set it to always
false
[binary, {packet, line}, {keepalive, true}, {active, false}]
.always
, never
, if_available
. Most modern smtp relays use tls, so set this to always
. Defaults to if_available
STARTTLS
upgrades in ssl:connect
, More info at Erlang documentation - ssl. Defaults to [{versions , ['tlsv1', 'tlsv1.1', 'tlsv1.2']}]
. This is merged with options listed at: smtp_socket.erl#L50 - SSL_CONNECT_OPTIONS .smtp_util:guess_FQDN()
. The hostname on your computer might not be correct, so set this to a valid value.smtp
, lmtp
. Default is smtp
You may wish to configure DKIM signing RFC6376 or RFC8463 (Ed25519) of outgoing emails for better security. To do that you need public and private keys, which can be generated by following commands:
# RSA
openssl genrsa -out private-key.pem 1024
openssl rsa -in private-key.pem -out public-key.pem -pubout
# Ed25519 - Erlang/OTP 24.1+ only!
openssl genpkey -algorithm ed25519 -out private-key.pem
openssl pkey -in private-key.pem -pubout -out public-key.pem
# DKIM DNS record p value for Ed25519 must only contain Base64 encoded public key, without ASN.1
openssl asn1parse -in public-key.pem -offset 12 -noout -out /dev/stdout | openssl base64
To send DKIM-signed email:
{ok, PrivKey} = file:read_file("private-key.pem"),
DKIMOptions = [
{s, <<"foo.bar">>},
{d, <<"example.com">>},
{private_key, {pem_plain, PrivKey}}]}
%{private_key, {pem_encrypted, EncryptedPrivKey, "password"}}
],
SignedMailBody = \
mimemail:encode({<<"text">>, <<"plain">>,
[{<<"Subject">>, <<"DKIM testing">>},
{<<"From">>, <<"Andrew Thompson <andrew@hijacked.us>">>},
{<<"To">>, <<"Some Dude <foo@bar.com>">>}],
#{},
<<"This is the email body">>},
[{dkim, DKIMOptions}]),
gen_smtp_client:send({"whatever@example.com", ["andrew@hijacked.us"], SignedMailBody}, []).
For using Ed25519 you need to set the option {a, 'ed25519-sha256'}
.
Don't forget to put your public key to foo.bar._domainkey.example.com
TXT DNS record as something like
RSA:
v=DKIM1; g=*; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBA......
Ed25519:
v=DKIM1; g=*; k=ed25519; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBA......
See RFC6376 for more details.
gen_smtp
ships with a simple callback server example, smtp_server_example
. To start the SMTP server with this as the callback module, issue the following command:
gen_smtp_server:start(smtp_server_example).
gen_smtp_server starting at nonode@nohost
listening on {0,0,0,0}:2525 via tcp
{ok,<0.33.0>}
By default it listens on 0.0.0.0 port 2525. You can telnet to it and test it:
^andrew@orz-dashes:: telnet localhost 2525 [~]
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost ESMTP smtp_server_example
EHLO example.com
250-orz-dashes
250-SIZE 10485670
250-8BITMIME
250-PIPELINING
250 WTF
MAIL FROM: andrew@hijacked.us
250 sender Ok
RCPT TO: andrew@hijacked.us
250 recipient Ok
DATA
354 enter mail, end with line containing only '.'
Good evening gentlemen, all your base are belong to us.
.
250 queued as d98ae19ee87f0741ac9ba90d7046f0c5
QUIT
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.
You can configure the server in general, each SMTP session, and the callback module, for example:
gen_smtp_server:start(
smtp_server_example,
[{sessionoptions, [{allow_bare_newlines, fix},
{callbackoptions, [{parse, true}]}]}]).
This configures the session to fix bare newlines (other options are strip
, ignore
and false
: false
rejects emails with bare newlines, ignore
passes them through unmodified and strip
removes them) and tells the callback module to run the MIME decoder on the email once its been received. The example callback module also supports the following options: relay
- whether to relay email on, auth
- whether to do SMTP authentication and parse
- whether to invoke the MIME parser. The example callback module is included mainly as an example and are not intended for serious usage. You could easily create your own callback options.
In general, following options can be specified gen_smtp_server:options()
:
{domain, string()}
- is used as server hostname (it's placed to SMTP server banner and HELO/EHLO response), default - guess from machine hostname{address, inet:ip4_address()}
- IP address to listen on, default {0, 0, 0, 0}
{port, inet:port_number()}
- port to listen on, default 2525
{family, inet | inet6}
- IP address type (IPv4/IPv6), default inet
{protocol, tcp | ssl}
- listen in tcp or ssl mode, default tcp
{ranch_opts, ranch:opts()}
- format depends on ranch version. Consult Ranch documentation.{sessionoptions, gen_smtp_server_session:options()}
- see belowSession options are:
{allow_bare_newlines, false | ignore | fix | strip}
- see above{hostname, inet:hostname()}
- which hostname server should send in response
to HELO
/ EHLO
commands. Default: inet:gethostname()
.{tls_options, [ssl:server_option()]}
- options to pass to ssl:handshake/3
when STARTTLS
command is sent by the client. Only needed if STARTTLS
extension
is enabled{protocol, smtp | lmtp}
- when lmtp
is passed, the control flow of the
Local Mail Transfer Protocol is applied.
LMTP is derived from SMTP with just a few variations and is used by standard
Mail Transfer Agents (MTA), like Postfix, Exim and OpenSMTPD to
send incoming email to local mail-handling applications that usually don't have a delivery queue.
The default value of this option is smtp
.{callbackoptions, any()}
- value will be passed as 4th argument to callback module's init/4
You can connect and test this using the gen_smtp_client
via something like:
gen_smtp_client:send(
{"whatever@test.com", ["andrew@hijacked.us"], "Subject: testing\r\nFrom: Andrew Thompson \r\nTo: Some Dude \r\n\r\nThis is the email body"},
[{relay, "localhost"}, {port, 2525}]).
If you want to listen on IPv6, you can use the {family, inet6}
and {address, {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}}
options to enable listening on IPv6.
Please notice that when using the LMTP protocol, the handle_EHLO
callback will be used
to handle the LHLO
command as defined in RFC2033,
due to their similarities. Although not used, the implementation of handle_HELO
is still
mandatory for the general gen_smtp_server_session
behaviour (you can simply
return a 500 error, e.g. {error, "500 LMTP server, not SMTP"}
).
gen_smtp relies on iconv for text encoding and decoding when parsing is activated.
To use gen_smtp, a eiconv
module must be loaded, with a convert/3
function.
You can use Zotonic/eiconv, which is used for tests on the project.
For that, you can add the following line to your rebar.config
file:
{deps, [
{eiconv, "1.0.0"}
]}.