Elixir-mail – Build composable mail messages

by plehoux • 10 years ago

97 30 10 years ago

I don't (currently) have a need for this so I'm not going to play with it right now, but I like that it looks idiomatically like Plug. Pass a struct through a pipeline until it's ready to go.

arca_vorago• 10 years ago

This is exactly one of the things I have been hoping would get started in Elixir. I would really like more helpful documentation though.

I'm imagining an entire ecosystem will begin to show up inside Elixir (and phoenix) as people realize how powerful it can be.

marvel_boy• 10 years ago

Absolutley agree with the lack of documentation. As a newbie on Elixir and Phoenix I wish it will improve over time.

aczerepinski3• 10 years ago

I've got to strongly disagree with you on this. This library is a day old and there are already descriptions and examples on every public function. This is an example of the Elixir community's EXCELLENT documentation.

alexgaribay• 10 years ago

The project had its first commit yesterday. I wouldn't expect any sort of serious/reliable documentation until more of the project gets implemented.

MCRed• 10 years ago

The code uses elixirs built in doc system so you should be able to build docs after cloning the repo.

At a cursory glance it seems pretty reasonably well documented.

markatkinson• 10 years ago

Yea it's ExDoc, think this should be helpful: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/docs-tests-an...

On mobile and on the run so can't confirm.

bryanjos• 10 years ago

There is documentation at hexdocs: http://hexdocs.pm/mail/

cschneid• 10 years ago

I like this builder pattern. Seems pretty similar to https://hackage.haskell.org/package/optparse-applicative as well, where you continually apply small functions to a data structure to end up with a big one.

Since Elixir doesn't have mandatory types, I assume there's no way to verify at compile time that it's a "valid" email (Has a recipient, and a from addr, whatever other requirements), and you'd have to check that in tests or at runtime?

im_down_w_otp2• 10 years ago

Use dialyzer.

tyingq• 10 years ago

Also very similar to Perl's Mail::Send: http://search.cpan.org/~markov/MailTools-2.14/lib/Mail/Send....

pmarreck3• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, email format validation (similar to HTML email) is somewhat of a black art:

http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate...

http://girders.org/blog/2013/01/31/dont-rfc-validate-email-a...

Of course one could always just go with RFC822 and this little regex:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

garethadams• 10 years ago

The parent wasn't talking about the individual validation of email addresses (although I guess that may be a part of the answer), but instead about checking the presence of a recipient, subject, sender etc as part of static typing.

bcardarella• 10 years ago

I'm the author. This library is still very early in development (two days of dev time). Its great that its on HN front page but I just want to manage expectations if you try to use the library. It is still very alpha.

pmarreck3• 10 years ago

While I like the composability from a readability standpoint, is this creating unnecessary VM GC churn due to needing to maintain immutability of the %Mail{} struct? In other words, would it be better if you could just apply all attributes at once (with one function call, say "put", that took, say, a Map)? Or does that basically destroy this convention. lol

aczerepinski3• 10 years ago

I doubt this is a performance issue, because it's the same pattern Phoenix uses to respond to an html request. Phoenix is very fast despite passing the much larger Plug.Conn struct through a much larger number of functions that similarly update one thing and return a new copy.

I'd also be curious to know what happens with GC behind the scenes for this pattern to be so performant - I don't know anything about that part.

jtwebman2• 10 years ago

How is this any different then https://github.com/antp/mailer? On mailer you can do the same compose using add_to, add_subject, etc... even though they don't show it on the readme.

mst• 10 years ago

It's probably worth at some point adding at least one example of actually then sending them mail somewhere via a local sendmail binary, and one for via SMTP.

IME if you provide an email sending library without email generation suggestions, or vice versa, yours users will do something completely unexpected (and probably not to your taste) for the other half.

(note that I'm explicitly not complaining that you didn't already do that, given how recently you got started - just trying to make sure it's on your list of stuff to do because bitter experience says it's more important than you might initially expect :)

rgawdzik2• 10 years ago

For anyone new to Elixir and is interested in it's performance, check out: https://github.com/mroth/phoenix-showdown

tldr: It rivals Go in performance.

TheHippo2• 10 years ago

For Go it uses the slowest webframework that is available.

rgawdzik2• 10 years ago

I don't use golang; what's faster than Gin? It seemed performance centric: https://gin-gonic.github.io/gin/

jrobn• 10 years ago

It's almost comparable to Gin, which isn't slow by any means.

cryptoxen• 10 years ago

They also tested the frameworks on a dual 10 core xeon where elixir/phoenix came out on top.

https://gist.github.com/omnibs/e5e72b31e6bd25caf39a

TheHippo2• 10 years ago

And you used the Go 1.3.3 which came out Oct 2014, but the current dev version for Elixir. This seems not fair.

no1youknowz• 10 years ago

I'd like to see vs Go 1.6 released.

jtwebman2• 10 years ago

This is old, I willing to bet Elixir and Pheonix are better then Go now. It isn't all about performance though. I find Elixir easier to read and maintain over Go as well.

kai_hn• 10 years ago

Related: A simple SMTP mailer in elixir: https://github.com/antp/mailer

awetzel• 10 years ago

Elixir-mail – Build composable mail messages

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