Postal

Create email using ASP.NET MVC views

Previewing generated emails

During development you want to iterate quickly and don’t want to send out a new mail each time you’ve made some changes to a template. That’s where EmailViewResult comes in. It’s an ActionResult class that can be returned from MVC actions, and simply renders your template to the browser.

To get started, just create an action that composes your Email object like you would do otherwise. But then, instead of sending it, you just pass it to the EmailViewResult constructor and return that from the action.

public class PreviewConroller : Controller 
{
    public ActionResult Example()
    {
        dynamic email = new Email("Example");
        // set up the email ...

        return new EmailViewResult(email);
    }
}

There are several possible scenarios of what the EmailViewResult will output:

  • If the resulting email simply is a text email, then the template will simply be rendered as text in the browser
  • If the email is an html email, then the html body will be rendered in the browser and the To, Cc, Bcc and Subject info will be rendered as an html comment for you to check
  • If the email contains both an html and a text version, then you can add a query string parameter to the url to indicate which version you want to see: ?format=text or ?format=html

If the resulting email is an html email and contains embedded images then those images will be inlined in the html as well.

Documentation