From 7c289c243d64259d3b2ec40b0393873913aa7a5b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 19:23:11 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] blog: add post on how to send email with nim (#71)

* blog: add post on how to send email with nim

* Update how-send-email-nim-2019-08-28.markdown

* Update how-send-email-nim-2019-08-28.markdown
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+---
+title: How to Send Email with Nim
+date: 2019-08-28
+---
+
+# How to Send Email with Nim
+
+Nim offers an [smtp][nimsmtp] module, but it is a bit annoying to use out of the
+box. This blogpost hopes to be a mini-tutorial on the basics of how to use the
+smtp library and give developers best practices for handling outgoing email in
+ways that Google or iCloud will accept.
+
+## SMTP in a Nutshell
+
+[SMTP][SMTPrfc], or the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the backbone of how 
+email works. It's a very simple line-based protocol, and there are wrappers for
+it in almost every programming language. Usage is pretty simple:
+
+- The client connects to the server
+- The client authenticates itself with the server
+- The client signals that it would like to create an outgoing message to the server
+- The client sends the raw contents of the message to the server
+- The client ends the message
+- The client disconnects
+
+Unfortunately, the devil is truly in the details here. There are a few things
+that _absolutely must_ be present in your emails in order for services like 
+GMail to accept them. They are:
+
+- The `From` header specifying where the message was sent from
+- The Mime-Version that your code is using (if you aren't sure, put `1.0` here)
+- The Content-Type that your code is sending to users (probably `text/plain`)
+
+For a more complete example, let's create a `Mailer` type and a constructor:
+
+```nim
+# mailer.nim
+import asyncdispatch, logging, smtp, strformat, strutils
+
+type Mailer* = object
+  address: string
+  port: Port
+  myAddress: string
+  myName: string
+  username: string
+  password: string
+  
+proc newMailer*(address, port, myAddress, myName, username, password: string): Mailer =
+  result = Mailer(
+    address: address,
+    port: port.parseInt.Port,
+    myAddress: myAddress,
+    myName: myName,
+    username: username,
+    password: password,
+  )
+```
+
+And let's write a `mail` method to send out email:
+
+```nim
+proc mail(m: Mailer, to, toName, subject, body: string) {.async.} =
+  let
+    toList = @[fmt"{toName} <{to}>"]
+    msg = createMessage(subject, body, toList, @[], [
+      ("From", fmt"{m.myName} <{m.myAddress}"),
+      ("MIME-Version", "1.0"),
+      ("Content-Type", "text/plain"),
+    ])
+
+  var client = newAsyncSmtp(useSsl = true)
+  await client.connect(m.address, m.port)
+  await client.auth(m.username, m.password)
+  await client.sendMail(m.myAddress, toList, $msg)
+  info "sent email to: ", to, " about: ", subject
+  await client.close()
+```
+
+Breaking this down, you can clearly see the parts of the SMTP connection as I
+laid out before. The `Mailer` creates a new transient SMTP connection, 
+authenticates with the remote server, sends the properly formatted email to
+the server and then closes the connection cleanly. 
+
+If you want to test this code, I suggest testing it with a freely available
+email provider that offers TLS/SSL-encrypted SMTP support. This also means that
+you need to compile this code with `--define: ssl`, so create `config.nims` and
+add the following:
+
+```nimscript
+--define: ssl
+```
+
+Here's a little wrapper using [cligen][cligen]:
+
+```nim
+when isMailModule:
+  import cligen, os
+  
+  let
+    smtpAddress = getEnv("SMTP_ADDRESS")
+    smtpPort = getEnv("SMTP_PORT")
+    smtpMyAddress = getEnv("SMTP_MY_ADDRESS")
+    smtpMyName = getEnv("SMTP_MY_NAME")
+    smtpUsername = getEnv("SMTP_USERNAME")
+    smtpPassword = getEnv("SMTP_PASSWORD")
+  
+  proc sendAnEmail(to, toName, subject, body: string) =
+    let m = newMailer(smtpAddress, smtpPort, smtpMyAddress, smtpMyName, smtpUsername, smtpPassword)
+    waitFor m.mail(to, toName, subject, body)
+  
+  dispatch(sendAnEmail)
+```
+
+Usage is simple:
+
+```console
+$ nim c -r mailer.nim --help
+Usage:
+  sendAnEmail [required&optional-params]
+Options(opt-arg sep :|=|spc):
+  -h, --help                         print this cligen-erated help
+  --help-syntax                      advanced: prepend,plurals,..
+  -t=, --to=       string  REQUIRED  set to
+  --toName=        string  REQUIRED  set toName
+  -s=, --subject=  string  REQUIRED  set subject
+  -b=, --body=     string  REQUIRED  set body
+```
+
+I hope this helps, this module is going to be used in my future post on how to
+create an application using Nim's [Jester][jester] framework.
+
+[nimsmtp]: https://nim-lang.org/docs/smtp.html
+[SMTPrfc]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321
+[jester]: https://github.com/dom96/jester
+[cligen]: https://github.com/c-blake/cligen