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Email & SMTP

Para has a dedicated API endpoint for sending emails at /v1/_emails. It allows you to send transactional emails with a direct API request to /v1/_emails, authenticated by API key or request signature. For attaching files, add the file field - it must have a value encoded as Data URI. Example JSON payload with attachment:

{
  "name": "Jane Doe",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "toEmails": ["[email protected]"],
  "subject": "Attached message",
  "message": "See attached.",
  "plaintextOnly": true,
  "markdownEnabled": false,
  "file": "data:text/plain;base64,SGVsbG8gd29ybGQ="
}

Formatting rules

Message rendering is resolved in this order:

  1. If plaintextOnly is true, HTML is stripped from message.
  2. Otherwise, if markdownEnabled is true, Markdown is converted to HTML.
  3. Otherwise, the raw message value is used as-is.

For public forms, formatting flags come from the stored Form object and override any client-provided values.

Programmatic access to the Emailer instance

Section titled “Programmatic access to the Emailer instance”

The Emailer interface has a simple API for sending email messages.

public interface Emailer {
  boolean sendEmail(List<String> emails, String subject, String body);
}

You can access the available emailer instance with:

Para.getEmailer().sendEmail(List.of("[email protected]"), "Hello", "How are you?");

There are several implementations of the Emailer class - one for JavaMail API and one using AWS SES to send emails (separate plugin). Para uses the Emailer APi for email verification, password recovery emails and email notifications. Set support_email to be the email address used by the system.

An example SMTP configuration for JavaMail:

para-application.conf
para.emailer = "javamail"
para.support_email = "[email protected]"
para.mail.host = "smtp.example.com"
para.mail.port = 587
para.mail.username = "[email protected]"
para.mail.password = "password"
para.mail.tls = true
para.mail.ssl = false

Email templates can be loaded with:

Emailer.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("emails/template.html")

Para supports basic variable substitutions through Mustache with Utils.compileMustache(data, template).

You can switch to a different Emailer implementation, e.g. Amazon SES, by loading the para-email-ses plugin and setting para.emailer = "AWSEmailer". Also comment out the para.mail.* properties as they are ignored. AWS credentials are picked up from the environment, like the AWS_PROFILE env. variable.