Email

It’s a simple mechanic to decompose emails into valuable parts, like some markup (to push emails directly into internal systems), create file attachments and extract inline images.

Flow is pretty simple, but we have a couple of components.

1. We need something to “receive” emails. The easiest way is to use Amazon SES or mailgun or… something else. There are a couple of SASS solutions for that.
2. Next step is to be notified when the email arrives, so we don’t have overhead with checking email every couple of minutes
3. We have to “decompose” – decode email from it’s raw format to text, and attachments. We can achieve that using couple of existing libraries, but you get the idea
4. We have to save all data and expose it to public

So we know what to do and roughly how to do the whole process. Points 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward for anyone who uses AWS and their services.

The problem:

We are using a bug tracking system, like most software development companies. Creating an issue is quite simple. Open bug tracking system, fill some inputs, upload attachments – done. The issue is created. Sometimes an issue is described with multiple attachments (screenshots). A bug tracking system allows us to embed images into a description. All issues come from users in the form of an email.

Pretty easy but annoying task. Especially when you want to send email using specific SMTP server, or from GMAIL using SSL or add some attachment, or send RAW emails. Solution is there – mailsend . Extremely simple command line tool for Linux, Mac OS X and even Windows ;). Compile / download binary and you can enjoy freedom of sending emails from command line.

It’s coming with experience. On the beginning you always trying to do everything by your self. No frameworks, no libraries – bare bone solutions written from the scratch. Later – you realising than your time is to expensive, and start using some libraries. After another period of time you are getting to the point, that you are willing to use as many existing solutions as it’s possible.

Really typical problem – sending and receiving emails from the apps. Of course – you can send emails using simple mail () command or using more sophisticated libraries like Swiftmailer but… if there is an option to use API, you can chose from couples: