New in Symfony 6.1: Draft Emails

April 29, 2022 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Symfony 6.1 is backed by:

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Warning: This post is about an unsupported Symfony version. Some of this information may be out of date. Read the most recent Symfony Docs.

Contributed by Kevin Bond in #44311

In HTML it's possible to create email links that, when clicked, open a new email message with some pre-filled information rather than linking to some other page:

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        <!-- creates an empty email with only the recipient address pre-filled -->
<a href="mailto:someone@example.com">Send email</a>

<!-- creates an email with most of its elements pre-filled -->
<a href="mailto:someone@example.com
    ?cc=other@example.com
    &bcc=another@example.com
    &subject=Lorem%20Ipsum
    &body=Some%20content%20of%20the%20email">
  Send email
</a>
    

However, sometimes you need to create a full email, with lots of contents and even file attachments. You can't do that with the mailto: feature. That's why Symfony 6.1 will add a feature to create draft emails.

Draft emails are email messages created as a file with the .eml extension and with the X-Unsent header set. This allows email clients to interpret them as draft emails that you can use to create the email to be sent.

First, use the new DraftEmail class to create those emails:

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        use Symfony\Component\Mime\DraftEmail;

$message = (new DraftEmail())
    // ...
    ->html($this->renderView('...'))
    ->attach('...');
    

Now you can define a controller that downloads this draft email as a .eml file:

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        // src/Controller/DownloadEmailController.php
namespace App\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\ResponseHeaderBag;
use Symfony\Component\Mime\DraftEmail;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class BudgetController extends AbstractController
{
    #[Route('/budget/estimate-generator/{clientId}')]
    public function estimateGenerator(): Response
    {
        // ...

        $message = (new DraftEmail())
            ->subject('Your estimate is now available')
            ->html($this->renderView('...'))
            ->attach('...');

        $response = new Response($message->toString());
        $contentDisposition = $response->headers->makeDisposition(
            ResponseHeaderBag::DISPOSITION_ATTACHMENT,
            'estimate.eml'
        );
        $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'message/rfc822');
        $response->headers->set('Content-Disposition', $contentDisposition);

        return $response;
    }
}
    

Published in #Living on the edge

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Comments

Thomas Schulz said on Apr 29, 2022 at 16:05

This sound cool but depends on a lot factors:

- Client's browser is set to open .EML files directly instead of saving it in Downloads folder and requires additional user action to find and open it.
- Client's emailing software must support this unofficial "X-Unsent" header. Our e-mail client (Tobit David Client) does not. What about mobile e-mail clients?
As far as I could find out, Outlook and Thunderboards seems to support this. What about others?
- Is there a fallback solution for clients with no such support?

This works well if you know your clients (i.e. using this technique in internals applications).

Kevin Bond Certified said on Apr 29, 2022 at 16:40

You're correct, it is a bit of a niche feature. In our app, we provide 2 links, an "Outlook Email" link (most of our clients use Outlook) and a simple fallback "mailto:" link.

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Apr 29, 2022 at 17:19

@Thomas don't think only about generating emails for visitors of your website/webapp. You can use this for example to automate many of the repetitive emails sent by your own employees. In that case, you can control which email client is used, so there would be no problem.

In the example of this blog post we do that, imagining that this is used to automate the sending of budget estimates to clients.

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