Hello,

I’m wondering how to handle emails properly in a phoenix application. There doesn’t appear to be a standard way of doing this, which surprises me.

Coming from the Rails world, my first intention is to bind transaction emails to data actions.

Eg. A Model can be submitted, and this action triggers a ModelEmail.submitted(query).

But if I want to call Model.submit(model) in a console where only the Repo context is Loaded, not the Endpoint, I get:

** (ArgumentError) argument error
    (stdlib) :ets.lookup(MyApp.Endpoint, :__phoenix_url__)
    (phoenix) lib/phoenix/config.ex:42: Phoenix.Config.cache/3
    (vae) web/router.ex:1: MyApp.Router.Helpers.application_url/4
    (vae) web/emails/model_email.ex:83: MyApp.ModelEmail.submit/1

because the email makes the use of the Endpoint to get absolute URLs in the email: Routes.model_url(Endpoint, :show, model)

So how should this be done?

IMHO, Sending email should be independent from starting the server, as the only necessary thing is the base URL.

Shouldn’t emails be in a separate process, which can be initialized if desired, and which will receive, either a conn, or an Enpoint or eventually a string like https://example.com so that paths like /path are turned into https://example.com/path?

What are the best practices here? I guess I’m not the first one to have this issue…