E-mail functionality uses the Apache Commons Email library under the hood. You can use theplay.libs.Mail utility class to send e-mail very easily.
A simple e-mail:
SimpleEmail email = new SimpleEmail();
email.setFrom("sender@zenexity.fr");
email.addTo("recipient@zenexity.fr");
email.setSubject("subject");
email.setMsg("Message");
Mail.send(email);
An HTML e-mail:
HtmlEmail email = new HtmlEmail();
email.addTo("info@lunatech.com");
email.setFrom(sender@lunatech.com", "Nicolas");
email.setSubject("Test email with inline image");
// embed the image and get the content id
URL url = new URL("https://img.zhankr.net/djg202xvwmm94501.png");
String cid = email.embed(url, "Zenexity logo");
// set the html message
email.setHtmlMsg("<html>Zenexity logo - <img src=\"cid:"+cid+"\"></html>");
// set the alternative message
email.setTextMsg("Your email client does not support HTML, too bad :(");
For more information see the Commons Email documentation.
Mail and MVC integration
You can also send complex, dynamic e-mail using the standard templates mechanism and syntax.
First, define a Mailer notifier in your application. Your mailer notifier must subclass play.mvc.Mailerand be part of the notifiers package.
Each public static method will be an e-mail sender, in a similar manner as actions for an MVC controller. For example:
package notifiers;import play.*;
import play.mvc.*;
import java.util.*;public class Mails extends Mailer { public static void welcome(User user) {
setSubject("Welcome %s", user.name);
addRecipient(user.email);
setFrom("Me <me@me.com>");
EmailAttachment attachment = new EmailAttachment();
attachment.setDescription("A pdf document");
attachment.setPath(Play.getFile("rules.pdf").getPath());
addAttachment(attachment);
send(user);
} public static void lostPassword(User user) {
String newpassword = user.password;
setFrom("Robot <robot@thecompany.com>");
setSubject("Your password has been reset");
addRecipient(user.email);
send(user, newpassword);
}}
text/html e-mail
The send method call will render the app/views/Mails/welcome.html template as the e-mail message body.
<html><body><p>Welcome <b>${user.name}</b>, </p>
...
</html>
The template for the lostPassword method could look like this:
app/views/Mails/lostPassword.html
<html>
<body><head>...</head><body>
<img src="mycompany.com/images"/>
<p>
Hello ${user.name}, Your new password is <b>${newpassword}</b>.
</p>
</body>
</html>
text/plain e-mail
If no HTML template is defined, then a text/plain e-mail is sent using the text template.
The send method call will render the app/views/Mails/welcome.txt template as the e-mail message body.
Welcome ${user.name},
...
The template for the lostPassword method could look like this:
app/views/Mails/lostPassword.txt
Hello ${user.name},Your new password is ${newpassword}.
text/html e-mail with text/plain alternative
If an HTML template is defined and a text template exists, then the text template will be used as an alternative message. In our previous example, if both app/views/Mails/lostPassword.html andapp/views/Mails/lostPassword.txt are defined, then the e-mail will be sent in text/html as defined in lostPassword.html with an alternative part as defined in lostPassword.txt. So you can send nice HMTL e-mail to your friends and still please those geeky friends that still use mutt 😉
Links to your application in e-mail
Your can include links to your application in e-mails like this:
@@{application.index}
If you send mails from Jobs you have to configure application.baseUrl in application.conf.
application.baseUrl must be a valid external baseurl to your application.
If the website playframework.org where to send you an e-mail from inside a Job, its configuration
would look like this:
application.baseUrl=http://www.playframework.org/
SMTP configuration
E-mail functionality is configured in your application’s conf/application.conf file. First of all, you need to define the SMTP server to use:
mail.smtp.host=smtp.taldius.net
If your SMTP server requires authentication, use the following properties:
mail.smtp.user=jfp
mail.smtp.pass=topsecret
Channel & ports
There are two ways to send the e-mail over an encrypted channel. If your server supports the starttlscommand (see: RFC 2487), you can use a clear connection on port 25 that will switch to SSL/TLS. You can do so by adding this configuration option:
mail.smtp.channel=starttls
Your server may also provide a SMTP-over-SSL (SMTPS) connector, that is an SSL socket listening on port 465. In that case, you tell Play to use this setup using the configuration option:
mail.smtp.channel=ssl
More about configuration
Under the hood, Play uses JavaMail to perform the actual SMTP transactions. If you need to see what’s going on, try:
mail.debug=true
When using SSL connections with JavaMail, the default SSL behavior is to drop the connection if the remote server certificate is not signed by a root certificate. This is the case in particular when using a self-signed certificate. Play’s default behavior is to skip that check. You can control this using the following property:
mail.smtp.socketFactory.class
If you need to connect to servers using non-standard ports, the following property will override the defaults:
mail.smtp.port=2500
Using Gmail
To use Gmail’s servers, use this configuration:
mail.smtp.host=smtp.gmail.com
mail.smtp.user=yourGmailLogin
mail.smtp.pass=yourGmailPassword
mail.smtp.channel=ssl
Continuing the discussion
Now we shall move on to Testing the application.
