TMTP is not working properly when deployed to netlify

Support
1

Hello Netlify community,

I’ve been using SMTP to send emails from web my app. It works flawlessly on my localhost environment but when I go to the netlify environment it’s unpredictable. Rarely it works and sends email (10% of the times) and most of the times it doesn’t work. Any idea what might be happening?
Here is the link to the site
https://63dcafd8d134110008ff5b4f--valuecumulation.netlify.app/

Here is how I am doing it:

import * as nodemailer from 'nodemailer'

export async function sendEmail({ to, subject, text, html }) {
  console.log('Inside sendEmail function')
  console.log('process.env.SMTP_HOST: ', process.env.SMTP_HOST)
  console.log('process.env.SMTP_PORT: ', process.env.SMTP_PORT)
  console.log('process.env.SMTP_USER: ', process.env.SMTP_USER)

  const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    host: process.env.SMTP_HOST,
    port: process.env.SMTP_PORT,
    secure: false,
    auth: {
      user: process.env.SMTP_USER,
      pass: process.env.SMTP_PASS,
    },
  })
  console.log('Before transporter.sendMail')

  transporter.sendMail(
    {
      from: process.env.AUTH_EMAIL_FROM,
      to: Array.isArray(to) ? to : [to],
      subject,
      text,
      html,
    },
    (err, info) => {
      if (err) {
        console.log('Error sending email: ', err)
      } else {
        console.log('Email sent envelope:', info.envelope)
        console.log('Email sent messageId:', info.messageId)
      }
    }
  )
  console.log('After transporter.sendMail')
}

and when I check the function log, I see the following logs:

Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   Inside sendEmail function
Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   process.env.SMTP_HOST:  smtp-relay.sendinblue.com
Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   process.env.SMTP_PORT:  587
Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   process.env.SMTP_USER:  I_HIDE_MY_EMAIL
Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   Before transporter.sendMail
Feb 2, 10:59:04 PM: 04d1a94f INFO   After transporter.sendMail

Any idea what might be happening?

Thanks in advance.

2

This can possibly be debugged, but based on my attempts with Nodemailer (about 2 years ago), it did not play well. It could very much be a user error (mine in that case) as I wasn’t as fluent in JavaScript as I’m today. However, I have since found alternative solutions and did not have to look back:

Unless you’ve a strong reason to use Nodemailer, I’d recommend taking a look at the above thread and switching to that. If that doesn’t work, we can continue debugging this.

3

@hrishikesh Thanks for the suggestion. I was able to make nodemailer work but adding await statement before calling the async function. However, I do not like it this way. I’d like it to happen in the background and I don’t want my app to have a bottleneck like this. Can your approach run without await statement?

4

If it’s a Promise, it must use await.

5

I see - thanks @hrishikesh.

For future readers, if you’re using nodemailer the solution is using await before calling the sendEmail method.

If your sendEmail method is something like

import * as nodemailer from 'nodemailer'

export async function sendEmail({ to, subject, text, html }) {
  const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    host: process.env.SMTP_HOST,
    port: process.env.SMTP_PORT,
    secure: false,
    auth: {
      user: process.env.SMTP_USER,
      pass: process.env.SMTP_PASS,
    },
  })

  const info = await transporter.sendMail({
    from: process.env.AUTH_EMAIL_FROM,
    to: Array.isArray(to) ? to : [to],
    subject,
    text,
    html,
  })

  if (info.messageId) {
    return {
      statusCode: 200,
      body: nodemailer.getTestMessageUrl(info),
    }
  }

  return {
    statusCode: 400,
    body: 'Oops',
  }
}

When you call this method later on, you’d have to call it with

await sendEmail