At Remote, we send many kinds of emails to our customers: emails about new payments, invoices, approved time off, onboarding new employees, and so on. There are so many emails, we needed to make sure we did not lose count of all the emails we send! This is the story of how we solved that issue — and how it can help you, too!

We use Swoosh to build and send out our application’s emails. It is easy to use, and it has many adapters that you can choose. It also has a really cool feature in which you can see all the outgoing emails of your app during the development time. For instance, you could open a tab at http://localhost:4000/dev/mailbox, click the button of your app to send an email, and see the email you sent sent pop up there.

The Swoosh Mailbox is really handy, but there are a few gotchas:

If you want to see the preview of the email, first you have to make your app send it by going through the process of submitting a new invoice or inviting a new user to your team.

It’s a development-time-only thing. If you were to expose this in production, you would expose private data from all your emails.

What if we could see the email just like in the mailbox, but with fake data and without going through all the hoops to send it?

We came up with Swoosh Gallery, a library that displays all the Swoosh emails of your Elixir app into a single place.

With Swoosh Gallery, you can gather all your emails in a single place and see all the information you had in Swoosh’s Mailbox without the need of manually sending it. You can also reuse all the email setup you already have in place; you just need to provide some preview fake data.

Vitor Cavalcanti

Articles published on Remote by Vitor Cavalcanti