Mail

Introduction

Masonite comes with email support out of the box. Most projects you make will need to send emails upon actions like account creation or notifications. Because email is used so often with software applications, masonite provides mail support with several drivers.

Getting Started

All mail configuration is inside config/mail.py and contains several well documented options. There are several built in drivers you can use but you can make your own if you'd like.

You can follow the documentation here at Creating a Mail Driver. If you do make your own, consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it. We may even put it in Masonite by default.

By default, Masonite uses the smtp driver. Inside your .env file, just put your smtp credentials. If you are using Mailgun then switch your driver to mailgun and put your Mailgun credentials in your .env file.

Configuring Drivers

There are two drivers out of the box that masonite uses and there is a tiny bit of configuration for both.

SMTP Driver

The SMTP driver takes several configuration files we can all put in our .env file.

.env

MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=[e-mail]
MAIL_FROM_NAME=Masonite
MAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
MAIL_PORT=465
MAIL_USERNAME=[e-mail]
MAIL_PASSWORD=password

Because this is SMTP, we can utilize all SMTP services such as mailtrap and gmail.

SSL (optional)

You may need to use an ssl version of SMTP depending on the service you are using. You can specify to use SSL by setting that option in your smtp driver configuration in config/mail.py:

DRIVERS = {
    'smtp': {
        'host': env('MAIL_HOST', 'smtp.mailtrap.io'),
        'port': env('MAIL_PORT', '465'),
        'username': env('MAIL_USERNAME', 'username'),
        'password': env('MAIL_PASSWORD', 'password'),
        'ssl': True
    },

TLS (optional)

The SMTP driver supports a TLS option as well if your mail server requires TLS:

DRIVERS = {
    'smtp': {
        'host': env('MAIL_HOST', 'smtp.mailtrap.io'),
        'port': env('MAIL_PORT', '465'),
        'username': env('MAIL_USERNAME', 'username'),
        'password': env('MAIL_PASSWORD', 'password'),
        'tls': True
    },

Thats it! As long as the authentication works, we can send emails.

Remember that it is safe to put sensitive data in your .env file because it is not committed to source control and it is inside the .gitignore file by default.

Mailgun Driver

Mailgun does not use SMTP and instead uses API calls to their service to send emails. Mailgun only requires 2 configuration settings:

.env

MAILGUN_SECRET=key-xx
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=sandboxXX.mailgun.org

If you change to using Mailgun then you will need to change the driver. By default the driver looks like:

config/mail.py

DRIVER = env('MAIL_DRIVER', 'smtp')

This means you can specify the mail driver in the .env file:

.env

MAIL_DRIVER=mailgun

or we can specify the driver directly inside config/mail.py

config/mail.py

DRIVER = 'mailgun'

Masonite will retrieve the configuration settings for the mailgun driver from the DRIVERS configuration setting which Masonite has by default, you do not have to change this.

config/mail.py

DRIVERS = {
    ...
    'mailgun': {
        'secret': env('MAILGUN_SECRET', 'key-XX'),
        'domain': env('MAILGUN_DOMAIN', 'sandboxXX.mailgun.org')
    }
}

Terminal Driver

The Terminal driver simply prints out your email message in the terminal. Makes testing and development super easy. To use the terminal driver you'll need to enter a few configuration settings.

.env

MAIL_DRIVER=terminal
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=[e-mail]
MAIL_FROM_NAME=Masonite
MAIL_HOST=
MAIL_PORT=
MAIL_USERNAME=
MAIL_PASSWORD=

Log Driver

The Log driver simply prints out your email message into a log file. To use the log driver you'll need to enter a few configuration settings.

.env

MAIL_DRIVER=log
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=[e-mail]
MAIL_FROM_NAME=Masonite
MAIL_HOST=
MAIL_PORT=
MAIL_USERNAME=
MAIL_PASSWORD=

Masonite will retrieve the configuration settings for the log driver from the DRIVERS configuration setting which Masonite has by default, you do not have to change this.

config/mail.py

DRIVERS = {
    ...
    'log': {
        'file': env('LOG_FILE', 'mail.log'),
        'location': 'bootstrap/logs'
    }
}

Sending an Email

The Mail class is loaded into the container via the the MailProvider Service Provider. We can fetch this Mail class via our controller methods:

from masonite import Mail

def show(self, mail: Mail):
    print(mail) # returns the default mail driver

We can send an email like so:

from masonite import Mail

def show(self, mail: Mail):
    mail.to('[e-mail]').send('Welcome!')

You can also obviously specify a specific user:

from app.User import User
from masonite import Mail
...
def show(self, mail: Mail):
    mail.to(User.find(1).email).send('Welcome!')

Masonite also supports the following .to() formats:

from masonite import Mail

def show(self, mail: Mail):
    # Single email address
    mail.to('[e-mail]').send('Welcome!')

    # Email with name
    mail.to('Joe Mancuso <[e-mail]>').send('Welcome!')

    # List of emails
    mail.to(['[e-mail]', 'user2.email.com']).send('Welcome!')

    # List of emails with name
    mail.to([
        'Joe Mancuso <[e-mail]>', 
        'John Mancuso <[e-mail]>'
    ]).send('Welcome!')

Queuing Emails

you can easily queue the sending of emails by using the queue method before the send method like so:

from app.User import User
from masonite import Mail
...
def show(self, mail: Mail):
    mail.to(User.find(1).email).queue().send('Welcome!')

Switching Drivers

All mail drivers are managed by the MailManager class and bootstrapped with the MailProvider Service Provider.

We can specify which driver we want to use. Although Masonite will use the DRIVER variable in our mail config file by default, we can change the driver on the fly.

You can see in our MailProvider Service Provider that we can use the MailManager class to set the driver. We can use this same class to change the driver:

from masonite.manager import MailManager

def show(self, manager: MailManager):
    manager.driver('mailgun') # now uses the Mailgun driver

Queues

Sending an email may take several seconds so it might be a good idea to create a Job. Jobs are simply Python classes that inherit from the Queueable class and can be pushed to queues or ran asynchronously. This will look something like:

from app.jobs.SendWelcomeEmail import SendWelcomeEmail
from masonite import Queue

def show(self, queue: Queue):
    queue.push(SendWelcomeEmail)

Instead of taking seconds to send an email, this will seem immediate and be sent using whatever queue driver is set. The async driver is set by default which requires no additional configuration and simply sends jobs into a new thread to be ran in the background.

Read more about creating Jobs and sending emails asynchronously in the Queues and Jobs documentation.

Changing the subject

We can also specify the subject:

mail.subject('Welcome!').to('[e-mail]').send('Welcome!')

Changing the Send From

You can specify which address you want the email to appear from:

mail.send_from('[e-mail]').to('[e-mail]').send('Welcome!')

Changing the Mime Type

By default, Masonite will send HTML emails but you can specify either HTML or plain text emails simply:

mail.html('<h1>Hello</h1>').send()

or plain text:

mail.text('world').send()

You can also send both:

mail.html('<h1>Hello</h1>').text('world').send()

Templates

The most common place to put your email templates is inside resources/templates/mail.

If you don't want to pass a string as the message, you can pass a view template.

mail.to('[e-mail]').template('mail/welcome').send()

This will render the view into a message body and send the email as html. Notice that we didn't pass anything into the send message

Passing Data to Templates

You are also able to pass data into our mail templates. This data is passed in as a dictionary that contains a key which is the variable with the corresponding value. We can pass data to the function like so:

mail.to('[e-mail]').template('mail/welcome', {'name': 'Masonite User'}).send()

Mailable Classes

Mailable classes are really helpful classes you can use to abstract some of the logic of sending emails out.

You can make a mailable class by creating a class in your app/mailables directory. You can do so by running a craft command:

$ python craft mailable WelcomeEmail

Now you can build a mailable class which you can use to later send. Let's build a welcome email:

from masonite.drivers import Mailable


class WelcomeEmail(Mailable):

    def __init__(self, to):
        self.to = to

    def build(self):
        return (
            self.subject('Welcome To My Application')
            .reply_to('[e-mail]')
            .send_from('[e-mail]')
            .view('emails/welcome')
            .to(self.to)
        )

Once built you can then use it in anyway you need to:

from masonite import Mail
from app.mailables import WelcomeEmail

def show(self, mail: Mail):
    mail.mailable(WelcomeEmail('[e-mail]')).send()