Send an email when a booking is created

[johnmckerrell]

[JackiePease]

[nodemailer] (https://nodemailer.com) seems to be the most common suggestion and looks as if it does what we want. You can use the gmail API, or SMTP which would allow us to move to another email provider if needed.
I'll set up a test.

[amcewen]

Tried out nodemailer and it seems to work well, and has integrations with Ethereal.email for development and testing.

We'll need different email server details for test/development and production, so I've spun out #58 to cover how we handle that.

Next steps will be to confirm that we can send email from a doesliverpool.com account and then work out how we'd set up templates for HTML and text bodies for the sent email.

[amcewen]

Tested nodemailer with Google mail this evening (as that's what production would use) and it works fine.

[amcewen]

Extended my test email javascript file to pull in mustache and generate the HTML part of the email body from a template. All seems to work okay, so I think the next step is to add it to the main code.

[amcewen]

Google seem to have turned off sending email via SMTP (the weeknotes stopped sending emails a few weeks back too) so I've been looking at Sendamatic (after it was recommended in this mastodon conversation to solve that. They only bill once you hit £0.30 in fees and charge £0.07/1000 emails, so I think the costs will be manageable 😀

I've signed up for an account, just need to wait to hear back from them as there's a manual account review process for new accounts.

[ajlennon]

I've just checked and I am successfully sending emails through Google/Gmail with xrhub.org.

I did have a problem getting this going as I had to disable TLS and use SSL or it didn't work.

[amcewen]

I can send email with my test js file via sendamatic. I've then switched over to #74 to work out how to pass in the user/pass for sendamatic.

[amcewen]

Still working through how we'll store secrets, but assuming the current approach works then we'll have email_user and email_pass variables in api/app.js, which are read in from /run/secrets/... at startup.