How to send an email using Panel

5 min read

Creating a web application may not be challenging, but mastering the skills to enhance its visual appeal can be quite demanding. This is why the prevalence of full-stack frameworks is increasing—they allow you to build comprehensive applications with just backend expertise. In this blog post, we will explore the process of how to send an email using Panel, a robust and user-friendly visualization and full-stack Python framework.

Is your system ready?

Proceed with the blog if you have already installed the Nylas Python SDK and configured your Python environment. Alternatively, you can refer to the Nylas Quickstart Guides.

If you haven’t done so, I suggest reading the post titled How to Send Emails with the Nylas Python SDK, which guides the basic setup.

What are we going to talk about?

What our Email Sender application will look like

Let’s outline the envisioned appearance of our application. It will feature a combo box for selecting the recipient, three text inputs for entering the name, email, and subject, a text area for composing the body, and a submit button. The combo box will retrieve the contacts list through the Nylas Contacts API. Upon selecting a contact, its name and email will automatically fill the corresponding fields, though we can manually specify the name and email.

Email Sender UI

Introduction to Panel

Panel’s first version was released on August 31, 2018, and it’s currently on version 1.3.2a1.

The web applications run on Tornado by default, but others like Flask, Django or Fast API.

As a stand-alone application, it’s powered by Pyodide or PyScript.

The learning curve encompasses a blend of straightforward and more challenging elements, resulting in an overall positive experience. The documentation proves to be sufficiently helpful, and the additional support from their GitHub repository enhances the learning process significantly.

Panel logo

We can install it by typing the following command in our terminal window:

$ pip3 install panel

Working with Panel

Once installed, we’re ready to go. Let’s create a file called panel_send_email.py with the following code:

# Import your dependencies
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os
from nylas import APIClient  # type: ignore
import panel as pn

# Load your env variables
load_dotenv()

# Initialize an instance of the Nylas SDK using the client credentials
nylas = APIClient(
    os.environ.get("CLIENT_ID"),
    os.environ.get("CLIENT_SECRET"),
    os.environ.get("ACCESS_TOKEN"),
)

# List to hold all contacts
emails_list = {'':''}

# Grab the contacts from the specified group
contacts = nylas.contacts.where(source = 'address_book', 
                                group = "517v55haghlcvnuu7lcm4f7k8")

# Loop all contacts and get the Id and Full Name
for contact in contacts:
    emails_list[f'{contact.given_name + " " + contact.surname}'] = list(contact.emails.values())[0][0]

# Call the notification message
def notify(event, msg):
    pn.state.notifications.info(msg)

# Get the contact name
def get_name(value):
   name = pn.widgets.TextInput(name='Name')	
   try:
       # Get the dictionary key from the value  
	   name.value = list(emails_list.keys())[list(emails_list.values()).index(value)]	   
   except:
	   name.value = ""
   return name

# Clean up widgets
def clean(event):
    name_hold().value = ""
    email.value = ""
    subject.value = ""
    body.value = ""
    name_hold().value = ""

def send_email(event):
    # Create the draft
    draft = nylas.drafts.create()
    # Assign subject, body and name and email of recipient
    draft.subject = subject.value
    draft.body = body.value
    draft.to = [{"name": f"{name_hold().value}", 
                     "email": f"{email.value}"}]    
    try:
        # Send the email
        draft.send()
        clean(event)
        notify(event, "Email was sent successfully")
    except Exception as e:
        notify(event, f'An error ocurred: {e}')
    finally:
        pass
    
# Activate extensions
pn.extension(notifications=True)
pn.extension('texteditor')

# Define the widgets
html_pane = pn.pane.HTML("""<h1>Email Sender</h1>""")
select = pn.widgets.Select(name='Contacts', options=emails_list)
email = pn.widgets.TextInput(name='Email')
name_hold = pn.bind(get_name, email)
subject = pn.widgets.TextInput(name='Subject')
body = pn.widgets.TextEditor(placeholder='Enter some text')
send = pn.widgets.Button(name='Send', button_type='primary')

# Link the select with the email widget
select.jslink(email, value='value')
# When we press the send button
send.on_click(send_email)

# Add the widgets to the application
pn.Row(
# Add spacers to keep everything in the middle
pn.Spacer(sizing_mode='stretch_both'),
pn.Column(
# Add the widgets in order
    html_pane,
    select,
    email,
    name_hold,
    subject,
    body,
    send
),pn.Spacer(sizing_mode='stretch_both')
# Add this to call the web server
).servable()

To run our application, we need to type the following on our terminal window:

$ panel serve panel_send_email.py --show --autoreload

The browser will open automatically:

Panel Email Sender

Here we can fill in the details and send our email:

Panel Email Sender Full

After clicking send, a notification will appear at the bottom right of the screen, indicating whether the email was successfully sent or not:

Email confirmation

And we can check our mailbox just to confirm:

Email received from Panel

We just send an email using Panel without spending too much time building a complicated UI.

What’s next?

To learn more about our Email APIs, visit our documentation Email API Overview.

You can sign up for Nylas for free and start building!

Don’t miss the action, join our LiveStream Coding with Nylas!

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