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

Nodemailer is the Node.js npm module that allows you to send emails easily. In this article, we will cover each step to send email using a Gmail account with the help of nodemailer. 

Prerequisites:

• NPM and NodeJS
• ExpressJS

Approach to send email with Nodemailer:

• Include the nodemailer module in the code using require(‘nodemailer’).
• 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 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: Below is basic example to show how to send mail using nodejs

Javascript

const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');

let mailTransporter =
    nodemailer.createTransport(
        {
            service: 'gmail',
            auth: {
                user: 'xyz@gmail.com',
                pass: '*************'
            }
        }
    );

let mailDetails = {
    from: 'xyz@gmail.com',
    to: 'abc@gmail.com',
    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.

var 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: "user@gmail.com",
    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: " user1@gmail.com, user2@gmail.com, user3@yahoo.in ",
    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.