Integrating email

[michael]

We can learn from Ghost how they are doing the email setup.

http://support.ghost.org/mail/

They use Nodemailer and recommend Mailgun as an email-sending-service.

[Integral]

I know how to send mailings with nodemailer. Without external services. Do you want to pay for mailgun?

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 2:32 PM Michael Aufreiter notifications@github.com wrote:

We can learn from Ghost how they are doing the email setup.

http://support.ghost.org/mail/

They use Nodemailer and recommend Mailgun as an email-sending-service.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/substance/notepad/issues/43.

[michael]

In for doing it ourselves but I'm just worried about configuring email setup. Because you can easily get blacklisted or what to do with emails that bounced back etc. I'm not sure we want to run that bit of infrastructure and invest time into maintaining it. I don't have experience. Starting with a service seems fine for me.. we could always switch if we exceed the free quote or if it gets to expensive.

[michael]

Can you setup nodemailer in a branch so it works locally (like during development).

[Integral]

Yes I can, if you will define some specs. Like what we want to sent.

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:06 PM Michael Aufreiter notifications@github.com wrote:

Can you setup nodemailer in a branch so it works locally (like during development).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/substance/notepad/issues/43#issuecomment-190186054.

[michael]

I just need the setup first. I think some generic backend method would be good for now.

sendMail('foo@bar.com', 'email-subject', 'email-content', function(err) {})

First thing I will use it for is for login, sending an url that includes a one-time loginKey. I will remove the login form I had.

[Integral]

If we want to send html emails and I'm sure we want than we should go with this thing: https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates (along with nodemailer). It means that we have number of mail templates and sends there variable. Much like we do with regular node templates.

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:38 PM Michael Aufreiter notifications@github.com wrote:

I just need the setup first. I think some generic backend method would be good for now.

sendMail('foo@bar.com', 'email-subject', 'email-content', function(err) {})

First thing I will use it for is for login, sending an url that includes a one-time loginKey. I will remove the login form I had.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/substance/notepad/issues/43#issuecomment-190193933.

[michael]

let's go with plain text first. I'm working on a solution to combine i18n with simple HTML templating. That we can use for emails as well. We don't want to introduce heavyweight templating solutions like handlebars.

[Integral]

The problem is much more bigger than you think. When you sending html emails along with css it must be converted to very basic and primitive inline styled thing. That why I used that stuff. We can't do it on our own. And sending plain emails is completely different thing. I think we could made an exception for sending mails. Michael, you should decide first what we are building an example or an app. If we go with example still than let's not do emailing at all (especially with external service like mailgun). If we don an app then let's do it well.

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:59 PM Michael Aufreiter notifications@github.com wrote:

let's go with plain text first. I'm working on a solution to combine i18n with simple HTML templating. That we can use for emails as well. We don't want to introduce heavyweight templating solutions like handlebars.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/substance/notepad/issues/43#issuecomment-190200144.

[michael]

Plain text is really fine for now and for mid-term future. We don't have time to do styling of emails anyway. Just don't want any extra dependencies/complexity now. We better focus on the other tasks.

[michael]

And yes Notes is an app but we want to keep a small scope still. So it doesn't eat a lot of time and we can keep maintaining it while working on other things.

[michael]

Done.