How can I send a multi-part email with text/plain and text/html parts with Grails?

Question

I've looked through the code and documentation for the Grails Mail plugin (version 0.9) and it doesn't have the support I'm looking for. You can only set a single body and then provide a mime attachment that points to a static file. I need to actual pass a model into a GSP and have it render both the HTML and plain text versions and then have those both available in the message. This will allow non-HTML-based e-mail clients to display the text/plain part and clients that support HTML to display the text/html part.

Has anybody done this with Grails? Is there an easy way to do it, or do I have to modify the mail plugin or just go to the Java Mail library directly?

Answer 1

We use multipart email with the standard email plugin. The following code snippet is located in a service class, that's why we're using standard groovy templating instead of the gsp engine:

        Template template = groovyPagesTemplateEngine.createTemplate(<templatename>)
        Writable emailBody = template.make(<data model as map>)
        StringWriter bodyWriter = new StringWriter()
        emailBody.writeTo(bodyWriter)

        String xml = <some xml>  

        mailService.sendMail {
            multipart true
            to <recipient>
            subject <subject string>
            body bodyWriter
            attachBytes "filename.xml", "text/xml", xml.getBytes('UTF-8')
        }

The crucial thing is that 'multipart true' appears at the beginning of the closure. If you add

html '<b>Hello</b> World'

to the closure above, I assume you'll get a text and html email with an attachment.