Sending emails often involves tons of overhead, you usually want to set up a few different things.

• Authentication credentials to either an email account or an email-sending service
• A pretty email layout so that your messages don’t look like spam
• Templates for each of the different types of email you would send
• The ability to send out multiple emails using a single API call
• Debugging facilities for development
• Some way to embed images so you don’t have to serve them

There already are popular solutions that deal with some of these things. For example, Nodemailer deals with the email sending part, but it doesn’t provide any easy to find examples of how to deal with a transactional API such as Postmark or Mandrill.

Then there’s node-email-templates, which deals with templating, but is really opinionated about it. You are to use ejs, you need to keep your templates in a directory, they need to be in such-and-such folder structure. Utter non-sense. The funniest part is that the library doesn’t really do a lot, other than complicate your templating process and providing a few layouts for you to copy and paste.

Enter campaign

When building out the project the first time around, I wrote a bunch of logic to be able to deal with email sending easily. I used Mandrill for a simple transactional email API, Mustache allowed me to write the templates, and I spent a lot of time fiddling with MailChimp’s responsive email templates, getting the layout just right. I also spent time dealing with embedded images, unsubcribe links, and Mandrill’s merge tags, used to customize emails sent to a lot of people at once.

I spent some time improving the API so that it wouldn’t be all over the place, making it easy to interact with while keeping the layout, the views, and the models completely separated. This is what it looks like:

Now, I’ve extracted the logic from Pony Foo’s codebase, refactoring the code as I went, simplified the API, and made it extensible. You’re now able to:

• Use it, since I’ve open sourced it (under MIT)
• Pick any email sending service, not just Mandrill, or bake your own
• Pick any template engine, or bake your own
• Get a default email service, just provide an API key
• Get a default template engine for free
• Get a default layout template out the box
• Customize it using styles that better represent your brand

Want to read some code?

var campaign = require('campaign');
var client = campaign({
    provider: campaign.providers.terminal()
});
var template = '
Your password reset key is: {{reset}}
';
var model = {
    to: 'someone@important.com',
    subject: 'Password Reset',
    reset: 'q12jFbwJsCKm'
};

client.sendString(template, model, done);

function done () {
  console.log('Done.');
}

The above will compile the template with Mustache, using the model we’ve provided, and “send” that email using the terminal transport, which doesn’t really send emails, it just prints the JSON on your terminal.

I’m pretty happy with how the code extraction turned out, and I hope to be able to deliver more focused libraries like this one in the future. Go read the documentation, I spent a lot of time writing that thing!