Sendmail transport

Sendmail transport pipes the generated RFC822 message to the standard input of the sendmail command, so it’s the same thing what the mail() function in PHP does.

To use Sendmail transport, set sendmail in Nodemailer transport options to true.

The additional options to use with this transport are the following:

  • path - path to the sendmail command (defaults to ‘sendmail’)
  • newline - either ‘windows’ or ‘unix’ (default). Forces all newlines in the output to either use Windows syntax <CR><LF> or Unix syntax <LF>
  • args - an optional array of command line options to pass to the sendmail command (ie. ["-f", "foo@example.com"]). This overrides all default arguments except for '-i' and recipient list so you need to make sure you have all required arguments set (ie. the ‘-f’ flag).

The command to be spawned by default looks like this:

sendmail -i -f from_addr to_addr[]

If args property was provided then the command looks like this:

sendmail -i args[] to_addr[]

The info argument for sendMail() callback includes the following properties:

  • envelope – is an envelope object {from:‘address’, to:[‘address’]}
  • messageId – is the Message-ID header value

Not Able to send Mail using sendmail transport ?

If createTransport function is not taking up the path which by default is ‘/usr/bin/sendmail’, make sure you have sendmail configured in your system. Take a look at Source (for linux/unix).

Examples

1. Send a message using specific binary

This example pipes message to a custom command using unix-style newlines. Sendmail does not produce any output besides the exit code, so there’s nothing else to return with the callback.

let transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    sendmail: true,
    newline: 'unix',
    path: '/usr/sbin/sendmail'
});
transporter.sendMail({
    from: 'sender@example.com',
    to: 'recipient@example.com',
    subject: 'Message',
    text: 'I hope this message gets delivered!'
}, (err, info) => {
    console.log(info.envelope);
    console.log(info.messageId);
});