DEV Community

Bervianto Leo Pratama

Posted on Jun 17, 2022

Email Testing using Ethereal

#node #tutorial #javascript #beginners

Preparation

Initiate your project or reuse your previous project. I will use Node.js here, but I will try to give other code samples for other programming languages.

Please prepare Node.js installation. You can download the installer from here. Currently, I use Node.js version 18.4.0. Feel free to try another version.

Initiate your project

Prepare file package.json using the npm init command. You can follow the guidelines to fill your package.json after you give the npm init command.

Install Nodemailer

I will use Nodemailer for email sending. You may use another library as you wish. In this post, I will cover Nodemailer only.

Install it use npm install nodemailer.

Let's get started

Basically, you may try the example from Nodemailer directly. But, I will add another example like sending an attachment. You can see the index.js file below. You see the code similar to the example, but I only add attachments to validate that I can use the attachment feature.

const nodemailer = require("nodemailer");

// async..await is not allowed in global scope, must use a wrapper
async function sendEmail() {
  // Generate test SMTP service account from ethereal.email
  // Only needed if you don't have a real mail account for testing
  let testAccount = await nodemailer.createTestAccount();

  // create reusable transporter object using the default SMTP transport
  let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    host: "smtp.ethereal.email",
    port: 587,
    secure: false, // true for 465, false for other ports
    auth: {
      user: testAccount.user, // generated ethereal user
      pass: testAccount.pass, // generated ethereal password
    },
  });

  // send mail with defined transport object
  let info = await transporter.sendMail({
    from: '"Fred Foo 👻" <foo@example.com>', // sender address
    to: "bar@example.com, baz@example.com", // list of receivers
    subject: "Hello ✔", // Subject line
    text: "Hello world?", // plain text body
    html: "<b>Hello world?</b>", // html body
    attachments: [
      {
        filename: 'hello.json',
        content: JSON.stringify({
          name: "Hello World!"
        })
      }
    ]
  });

  console.log("Message sent: %s", info.messageId);

  // Preview only available when sending through an Ethereal account
  console.log("Preview URL: %s", nodemailer.getTestMessageUrl(info));
}

sendEmail().catch(console.error);