Hi All,

For a small business application we want to send e-mails from our nodejs application. In this blog post I will show you how you can use sap-cf-mailer based on nodemailer to send emails through an SMTP server defined in your destinations.

https://nodemailer.com

Test SMTP server

Instead of testing the code with your own email account and loading your mailbox full with test emails, you can use mailtrap as test SMTP server. It’s free for one inbox.

https://mailtrap.io/

Create an account on mailtrap and create a new inbox. Open the inbox and take a look at the settings. All mails send over this SMTP server will be delivered here without sending them to the real receiver.

MAIL destination

We need to create a mail destination that links to our SMTP server.

In this destination we configured following properties:

• Name: a name for the destination
• Type: MAIL
• username and password from your mailtrap SMTP server
• mail.smtp: smtp server address
• mail.port: smtp server port
• mail.from: if there is no mail from specified in the code, we will use this email address to send the mails.

NodeJS application

To send mails, we first have to read this destination properties and then send them to the nodemailer library. To make things a lot easier, I created a new library that will read the destination service and add it to the nodemailer for you.

Your application needs a reference to a destination service to be able to read the mailtrap-destination. this is how my mta.yaml file looks like

ID: sap-cf-mailer-example
_schema-version: "2.1"
description: Example sap cf mailer
version: 0.0.1
modules:
  - name: approuter
    type: approuter.nodejs
    path: approuter
    parameters:
      disk-quota: 256M
      memory: 256M
    requires:
      - name: uaa
      - name: destination_service
      - name: mail_api
        group: destinations
        properties:
          forwardAuthToken: true
          name: mail_api
          strictSSL: false
          url: '~{url}'
  - name: srv
    type: nodejs
    path: srv
    parameters:
      memory: 512M
      disk-quota: 256M
    provides:
      - name: mail_api
        properties:
          url: ${default-url}
    requires:
      - name: uaa
      - name: destination_service
resources:
  - name: destination_service
    type: org.cloudfoundry.existing-service
  - name: uaa
    type: org.cloudfoundry.existing-service

In the srv folder, just install the sap-cf-mailer library with:

$ npm install -s sap-cf-mailer

in your nodeJS application you can use it to send text or HTML emails.

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const SapCfMailer = require('sap-cf-mailer').default;

const transporter = new SapCfMailer("MAILTRAP");

app.use(express.json());

app.get('/sendmail', async (req, res) => {
    // use sendmail as you should use it in nodemailer
    const result = await transporter.sendMail({
        to: 'someoneimportant@sap.com',
        subject: `This is the mail subject`,
        text: `body of the email`
    });

    res.send(result);
});

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;;
app.listen(port, function () {
    console.log('myapp listening on port ' + port);
});

The result

After running the application you can check in the mailtrap inbox which email is sent to who!

So, now you can send emails in your nodejs cloud foundry application using the sap-cf-mailer module. For more advanced features like sending html emails and attachments your can consult the nodemailer documentation.

kr,

Joachim