Sending emails

The OpenAF included plugin Email allows to easily send emails from any OpenAF script. Let’s check it using a simple example:

plugin("Email");
var email = new Email("smtp.gmail.com", "my.email@gmail.com", true, true, false);
email.login("my.email@gmail.com", "myAppPassword");
email.send("Something is wrong", "Something was detected to be very wrong.", [ "someone@somewhere.com" ], [], [], "my.email@gmail.com");

Step by step

Let’s translate each line. After including the plugin Email we created a new Email instance for the SMTP server “smtp.gmail.com” for the email account “my.email@gmail.com”, turned SSL and TLS on and specified the email wasn’t going to contain any HTML.

// Email(aSMTPServer, theFromEmailAddress, useSSL, useTLS, containsHTML)
var email = new Email("smtp.gmail.com", "my.email@gmail.com", true, true, false);

The Email plugin will try to “guess” the right ports to access the SMTP server but if you need to force it you can do it:

email.setPort(12345);

The next step was authenticating with the SMTP server:

email.login(aLogin, aPassword);

And then finally we sent the simple email:

// email.send(aSubjectString, aMessageString, anArrayOfTOs, anArrayOfCCs, anArrayOfBCCs, aFromEmailAddress)
email.send("Something is wrong", "Something was detected to be very wrong.", [ "someone@somewhere.com" ], [], [], "my.email@gmail.com");

How to send a HTML email

To send a HTML email first you will need to specify it on the Email instance creation:

var email = new Email("smtp.gmail.com", "my.email@gmail.com", true, true, true);

Afterwards you add the HTML using the .setHTML function:

email.setHTML("<h1>BIG NEWS</h1>Everything is <b>okay</b>.");

So, if we just defined the email contents why should we defined aMessageString on the email.send function? In case the email client doesn’t support HTML emails the aMessageString parameter of the email.send function will be used.

Adding attachments

To add an attachment use the function email.addAttachment:

email.addAttachment("/my/folder/with/attach1.pdf");

Adding images for the HTML content

If you use HTML content you will probably also want to include images. These aren’t the usual regular attachments and there is actually 3 options available:

Embed image files 

email.setHTML("<html>...<img src=\"cid:myimage.png\"/>...</html>");
email.embedFile("/some/path/myimage.png", "myimage.png");

Embed image URLs 

email.setHTML("<html>...<img src=\"cid:myimage\"/>...</html>");
email.embedURL("https://some.server/some/image.jpg", "myimage");

Automatic embedding images and reference them by URL 

email.setHTML("<html>...<img src="https://some.server/some/image.jpg"/>...</html>");
email.addExternalImage("https://some.server/some/image.jpg");

How to debug

After creating the new Email instance just add:

email.getEmailObj().setDebug(true);

Once the email sending operation starts all communication with the SMTP server will be output to stdout/stderr.