Sending email using Gmail SMTP - Meteorjs

Hi I am trying set up my gmail account to send email for my Meteor app, not very easy so far

server.js

Meteor.startup(function () {
  smtp = {
    username: 'xxxxx',   // eg: [email protected]
    password: 'YYYYYYYY',   // eg: 3eeP1gtizk5eziohfervU
    server:   'smtp.gmail.com',  // eg: mail.gandi.net
    port: 465
  }

  process.env.MAIL_URL = 'smtp://' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.username) + ':' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.password) + '@' + encodeURIComponent(smtp.server) + ':' + smtp.port;
});

Email.send({
  from: "[email protected]",
  to: "[email protected]",
  subject: "Meteor Can Send Emails via Gmail",
  text: "Its pretty easy to send emails via gmail."
});

And the testing email is never sent with the below error code saying that I havent set the environment variable.

I20150715-18:14:02.641(0)? ====== BEGIN MAIL #0 ======
I20150715-18:14:02.642(0)? (Mail not sent; to enable sending, set the MAIL_URL environment variable.)
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? MIME-Version: 1.0
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? From: [email protected]
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? To: [email protected]
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? Subject: Meteor Can Send Emails via Gmail
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
I20150715-18:14:02.643(0)? Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I20150715-18:14:02.644(0)? 
I20150715-18:14:02.644(0)? Its pretty easy to send emails via gmail.
I20150715-18:14:02.645(0)? ====== END MAIL #0 ======

Could this be due I am running this on C9?

Thanks

Solution

Sucks that cloud9 does not permit the setting of environment variables. Perhaps you can set the Meteor.settings object rather than an environment variable?

http://docs.meteor.com/#/full/meteor_settings

Essentially, you can pass JSON to meteor when you start it using --settings. These will be available on the server side only, unless wrapped under a "public" object of the root.

{
  'public': {
     'some-setting': 'some-value'
  },
  'other-setting': 'other-value'
}

That is a work around for dealing with no envrionmental variables. As the core email package always looks at the MAIL_URL environmental variable, you will probably need to send email through another service/provider.

Mandrill (by Mailchimp) have a sizeable free tier and will allow you to send transactional email. You can even make a mail template in mailchimp, export to HTML, import to mandrill and pass in merge variables in your API calls.

Better yet, there is a kick-ass package for writing to the Mandrill API. https://atmospherejs.com/wylio/mandrill

Hope that helps!

Elliott