How to send email with Nodemailer using Gmail account in Node ?

Nodemailer is an npm module that allows you to send emails easily from the backend. In this article, we will cover the steps to send email using a Gmail account with the help of nodemailer. 

Prerequisites:

• NPM and NodeJS
• ExpressJS

Approach

To send email with Nodemailer using gmail

• Import the nodemailer module.
• Use nodemailer.createTransport() function to create a transporter who will send mail. It contains the service name and authentication details (user ans password).
• Declare a variable mailDetails that contains the sender and receiver email id, subject and content of the mail.
• Use mailTransporter.sendMail() function to send email from sender to receiver. If message sending failed or contains error then it will display error message otherwise message send successfully.

Steps to Create the Node Application

Step 1: Initialise the nodejs with the following command to create a package.json file:

npm init -y

Step 2: Installing required modules

npm install express nodemailer -S

Project Structure:

The updated dependencies in package.json file will look like:

"dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.18.2",
    "nodemailer": "^6.9.8",
} 

Example: This example uses nodemainler in node js to sent emails uing the gmail account.

// Filename - index.js

const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');

let mailTransporter =
    nodemailer.createTransport(
        {
            service: 'gmail',
            auth: {
                user: '[email protected]',
                pass: '*************'
            }
        }
    );

let mailDetails = {
    from: '[email protected]',
    to: '[email protected]',
    subject: 'Test mail',
    text: 'Node.js testing mail for GeeksforGeeks'
};

mailTransporter
    .sendMail(mailDetails,
        function (err, data) {
            if (err) {
                console.log('Error Occurs');
            } else {
                console.log('Email sent successfully');
            }
        });

Now open the link https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps to Allow less secure apps: ON. Then use node server.js command to run the above code. It will send the email using gmail account. 

Type the following command in terminal to run code: 

Sent mail:

Note 1: To use this code in any file we just have to import this file and call send() function.

const mail = require('./config/mailer')();
mail.send();

Note 2: To send HTML formatted text in your email, use the "html" property instead of the "text" property in sendMail function.

{ 
    from:'"admin" ',
    to: "[email protected]",
    subject:'GeeksforGeeks Promotion',
    html:' <p> html code </p>'
}

Note 3: To send an email to more than one receiver, add them to the "to" property in sendMail function, separated by commas.

{
    from: '"admin" ',
    to: " [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ",
    subject: 'GeeksforGeeks Promotion',
    text: 'Check out GeeksforGeeks' + 'best site to prepare for interviews and competitive exams.'
}

Google now have come up with a concept of "Less Secure Apps" which is any application which accepts password as plain text. So to use this the application must have OAuth2 authentication.