Lift Cookbook

Chapter 9. Around Lift

This chapter looks at interacting with other systems from within Lift, such as sending email, calling URLs, or scheduling tasks.

Many of the recipes in this chapter have code examples in a project at https://github.com/LiftCookbook/cookbook_around.

Sending Plain-Text Email

Problem

You want to send a plain-text email from your Lift application.

Solution

Use the Mailer:

import net.liftweb.util.Mailer
import net.liftweb.util.Mailer._

Mailer.sendMail(
  From("[e-mail]"),
  Subject("Hello"),
  To("[e-mail]"),
  PlainMailBodyType("Hello from Lift") )

Discussion

Mailer sends the message asynchronously, meaning sendMail will return immediately, so you don’t have to worry about the time costs of negotiating with an SMTP server. However, there’s also a blockingSendMail method if you do need to wait.

By default, the SMTP server used will be localhost. You can change this by setting the mail.smtp.host property. For example, edit src/mail/resources/props/default.props and add the line:

mail.smtp.host=smtp.example.org

The signature of sendMail requires a From, Subject, and then any number of MailTypes:

To, CC, and BCC

The recipient email address

ReplyTo

The address that mail clients should use for replies

MessageHeader

Key/value pairs to include as headers in the message

PlainMailBodyType

A plain-text email sent with UTF-8 encoding

PlainPlusBodyType

A plain-text email, where you specify the encoding

XHTMLMailBodyType

For HTML email (SMTP Authentication)

XHTMLPlusImages ...