MMEmail: My First Clojure Open Source Contribution

While working on website for my sister, I was perturbed that there were no libraries on Clojars for sending email. I was using Leiningen which will download and include all your dependancies for you (so sweet!).

posts/2010-04-21-mmemail-my-first-clojure-open-source/mmemail-1.jpg — MMEmail, My first Clojure Open Source Contribution.

Yet, with the library I found, I had to manually download all the required jars. Call me lazy but being forced to manually download dependancies seems like cruel and unusual punishment these days.

So I solved the problem with MMEmail: Simple Clojure library for sending email, with just one jar!

Installation

Leiningen

1>
2(defproject your-project "0.0.0"
3 :dependencies [[mmemail "1.0.0"]]

Jar File

Can be downloaded at http://clojars.org/repo/mmemail/mmemail/1.0.0/mmemail-1.0.0.jar

Usage

Include the library:

1(use 'mmemail.core)

The Easy Way

mmemail.core is the only include you need. It contains only 2 methods, the fist being send-email. It takes a map that includes all the configuration and email parameters. That’s it.

1(send-email {:host "smtp.gmail.com"
2 :port 465
3 :ssl true
4 :user "road@gmail.com"
5 :password "runner"
6 :to "joe@acme.com"
7 :subject "Greetings"
8 :body "Meep Meep!"})

Most of the parameters are required, but based on your server configuration you might get away without these:

:ssl
:password
:subject

It also accepts the following optional parameters:

:from (defaults to :user)
:cc
:bcc

The recipient parameters (:to, :cc, :bcc) may be a string, for one recipient, or a sequence of strings, for multiple recipients.

The Convenient Way

It can be annoying to pass such a big map into the function, and typically you’ll want to get all the server configuration out of the way. This is where the second function of mmemail.core (create-mailer) comes into play.

1(def my_mailer (create-mailer {:host "smtp.gmail.com"
2 :port 465
3 :ssl true
4 :user "road@gmail.com"
5 :password "runner"}))

Create-mailer will return a new function with all the configuration baked in. So in the future, you can send email like so:

1(my_mailer {:to "joe@acme.com"
2 :subject "Greetings"
3 :body "Meep Meep!"})

The create-mailer accepts email parameters that will be used as defaults when the generated function is called.

1(def my_mailer (create-mailer {:subject "Greetings"
2 :body "Meep Meep!"
3 :host "smtp.gmail.com"
4 :port 465
5 :ssl true
6 :user "road@gmail.com"
7 :password "runner"}))
8(my_mailer {:to "joe@acme.com"})