✨ Send HTML content in email

[foysalit]

Using a very simple regex, check if the email content contains any html tags in it and send it as html, otherwise, fallback to plain-text content

[bnewbold]

As a chronic user of text email (instead of HTML), it is nice when automated emails like this get sent as both text/plain and text/html. Markdown can go in text/plain and that would be what is expected in the content of the API request, with the server doing Markdown-to-HTML.

Alternatively, the Lexicon endpoint could have text and html fields to pass-through from client.

Or, have a contentType field in the Lexicon which can indicate if text or HTML (or markdown?); that wouldn't make sending both easy, but it might be better than auto-detecting HTML, which feels brittle.

All the above are ideas and could be done later; I wouldn't block merging this sniffing PR as-is.

[devinivy]

There is also a plugin for nodemailer, used on the server, that automatically generates the plaintext version of an email given an html email. I pretty much always use it when I'm using nodemailer! One option is to always treat emails as html (e.g. representing linebreaks with <br />), and let the plugin fill-in the plaintext version. https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodemailer-html-to-text

Relatedly, if we take the approach here, will the HTML content being sent-up represent linebreaks properly? For example, this content represented in HTML may not look right to users due to how whitespace gets collapsed:

Hi all,
Have you seen <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>?

Best,
divy

Another option is to assume all email contents are markdown, and send an HTML version compiled from markdown with that plugin 👆 generating a plaintext version. That might be a convenient way to author marked-up email contents without needing to scatter <p>...</p> and <br /> all over the place.

[devinivy]

Ohp, just saw the PR to author emails in markdown on the client! In which case yeah, I think the move might be to:

• author all emails in markdown on the client.
• compile email markdown to html on the client, and treat all emails as html on the server (or explicitly indicate the content type, as @bnewbold suggested).
• use the nodemailer-html-to-text plugin to provide a plaintext version of all emails.

[foysalit]

@devinivy ok so I think treating all incoming content as html is the easiest option and I am not seeing a case where we would need to explicitly send plaintext content so adding contentType param just to facilitate that feels like unnecessary bloat right now.

[foysalit]

@devinivy can I get one more look at this please? thanks!