Web Development with Node and Express

Chapter 11. Sending Email

One of the primary ways your website can communicate with the world is email. From user registration to password reset instructions to promotional emails to problem notification, the ability to send email is an important feature.

Neither Node or Express has any built-in way of sending email, so we have to use a third-party module. The package I recommend is Andris Reinman’s excellent Nodemailer. Before we dive into configuring Nodemailer, let’s get some email basics out of the way.

SMTP, MSAs, and MTAs

The lingua franca for sending email is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). While it is possible to use SMTP to send an email directly to the recipient’s mail server, this is generally a very bad idea: unless you are a “trusted sender” like Google or Yahoo!, chances are your email will be be tossed directly into the spam bin. Better to use a Mail Submission Agent (MSA), which will deliver the email through trusted channels, reducing the chance that your email will be marked as spam. In addition to ensuring that your email arrives, MSAs handle nuisances like temporary outages and bounced emails. The final piece of the equation is the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), which is the service that actually sends the email to its final destination. For the purposes of this book, MSA, MTA, and “SMTP server” are essentially equivalent.

So you’ll need access to an MSA. The easiest way to get started is to use a free email service, such as Gmail, Hotmail, iCloud, SendGrid, ...