Releasing the mandrill package on Hackage

Posted in: haskell.

Releasing the “mandrill” package

Today I’m releasing the mandrill package for interfacing with the Mandrill API. In case you don’t know what Mandrill is, is an API-based service for sending transactional emails. The free plan ships with a free and attractive quota of 12k email a month, which makes it a cheap solution for small-medium businesses.

About the mandrill package

The package per se is not rocket science: it just ships a bunch of boilerplate to be able to send and receive JSON from Mandrill. On top of this tough:

• It provide decent documentation;
• It compiles and supports GHC 7.4, 7.6 and 7.8, making it usable in production even if you are running a couple of GHC versions behind;
• It ships with a low level IO-based API as well as an handy transformer.

What has been wrapped

The library scratches my own itches, namely be able to send quickly and easily an email message using Mandrill. Pull Requests are certainly welcome, please fork away!

Getting started

Using the built-in transformer is as easy as:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Text.Email.Validate
import Network.API.Mandrill

main :: IO ()
main = do
  case validate "foo@example.com" of
    Left err   -> print $ "Invalid email!" ++ show err
    Right addr -> runMandrill "MYTOKENHERE" $ do
      let msg = "Hello from Haskell"
      res <- sendEmail (newTextMessage addr [addr] "Hello" msg)
      case res of
        MandrillSuccess k -> liftIO (print k)
        MandrillFailure f -> liftIO (print f)

The choice of email-validate

Astute readers will notice I have used the email-validate package from Hackage. Even though I like the fact you are forced to validate your email before sending them out, I also feel this might become burdensome on the long run. I’m open to feedback here.

Getting the package

The package is available on Hackage as we speak:

cabal install mandrill

Enjoy! Alfredo

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