Frankiemail

Send email via SMTP from any Frankie script. Zero external dependencies — uses Python's built-in smtplib under the hood.

Introduced in v1.16.

Functions

`send_mail(opts)`

Send an email. All parameters are keyword arguments with defaults, so you only pass what you need.

Option	Default	Description
`to`	`""`	Recipient address
`subject`	`""`	Email subject line
`body`	`""`	Plain-text or HTML body
`from`	`"frankie@localhost"`	Sender address
`smtp`	`"localhost"`	SMTP server hostname
`port`	`587`	SMTP port — `587` = STARTTLS, `465` = SSL, `25` = plain
`user`	`""`	SMTP username (leave blank for unauthenticated)
`pass`	`""`	SMTP password
`html`	`false`	Set `true` to send an HTML body
`cc`	`""`	CC address
`bcc`	`""`	BCC address

Returns {ok: true} on success, or {ok: false, error: "..."} on failure.

Basic Example

stitch "frankiemail"

result = send_mail(
  to:      "alice@example.com",
  subject: "Hello from Frankie!",
  body:    "This was sent by a Frankie script.",
  from:    env("MAIL_FROM", "bot@example.com"),
  smtp:    env("SMTP_HOST", "smtp.gmail.com"),
  port:    587,
  user:    env("SMTP_USER"),
  pass:    env("SMTP_PASS")
)

if result["ok"]
  puts "Email sent!"
else
  puts "Failed: #{result["error"]}"
end

HTML Email

stitch "frankiemail"

html_body = <<~HTML
  <h1>Frankie Report</h1>
  <p>Your nightly job completed at <strong>#{now().format("%H:%M")}</strong>.</p>
  <p>Records processed: <strong>1,024</strong></p>
HTML

send_mail(
  to:      "reports@example.com",
  subject: "Nightly Report",
  body:    html_body,
  html:    true,
  smtp:    env("SMTP_HOST"),
  user:    env("SMTP_USER"),
  pass:    env("SMTP_PASS")
)

With CC / BCC

stitch "frankiemail"

send_mail(
  to:      "alice@example.com",
  cc:      "manager@example.com",
  bcc:     "audit-log@example.com",
  subject: "Deployment complete",
  body:    "v1.16 deployed to production.",
  smtp:    env("SMTP_HOST"),
  user:    env("SMTP_USER"),
  pass:    env("SMTP_PASS")
)

Error Handling

stitch "frankiemail"

result = send_mail(
  to:      "ops@example.com",
  subject: "Alert: disk usage > 90%",
  body:    "Please investigate immediately.",
  smtp:    env("SMTP_HOST", "localhost"),
  user:    env("SMTP_USER", ""),
  pass:    env("SMTP_PASS", "")
)

if not result["ok"]
  puts "Mail error: #{result["error"]}"
  # Fallback: write to a local log instead
  file_append("mail_errors.log", "#{now()}: #{result["error"]}\n")
end

Sending from a Script

A common pattern is to run a Frankie script as a cron job and email the output:

stitch "frankiemail"

db = db_open("app.db")
rows = db.find_all("events")
db.close

lines = rows.map do |r|
  "#{r["created_at"]}  #{r["type"]}  #{r["user"]}"
end

send_mail(
  to:      env("REPORT_EMAIL"),
  subject: "Daily event log — #{today().format("%Y-%m-%d")}",
  body:    lines.join("\n"),
  smtp:    env("SMTP_HOST"),
  user:    env("SMTP_USER"),
  pass:    env("SMTP_PASS")
)

Notes

port: 587 uses STARTTLS, which is compatible with Gmail, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and most hosted SMTP providers.
port: 465 uses SSL/TLS directly. port: 25 sends with no encryption and no auth.
For Gmail, use an App Password (not your account password) and ensure "Less secure app access" or OAuth2 is configured.
Set credentials via env() rather than hardcoding them. A .env file loaded with dotenv() works well.
frankiemail is a thin Frankie wrapper around the built-in smtp_send() stdlib function, which uses Python's smtplib.