Bamboo

Bamboo is an Elixir library for composing and delivering email. It separates email creation from delivery, letting you build emails with a clean pipe-based API and send them through pluggable adapters for services like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Mandrill.

Why Bamboo?

Composable by design — Emails are plain structs built through function pipelines. You can create shared base emails, layer on recipients and content, and pass them around like any other data.

Adapter-based delivery — Swap between email providers by changing a single configuration line. Use a local adapter during development, a test adapter in your test suite, and a production adapter like SendGrid when you deploy.

Built for testing — Because emails are just structs, unit tests can assert directly against fields without mocking. For integration tests, the included TestAdapter and assertion helpers make it straightforward to verify emails were sent with the right content.

Phoenix integration — The companion bamboo_phoenix package lets you render email bodies using Phoenix views and layouts, so you can share templates across your application.

Core Concepts

Bamboo is organized around three main pieces:

Email — A struct representing a message. You build one using functions from Bamboo.Email like new_email/1, to/2, from/2, subject/2, and html_body/2.
Mailer — A module in your application that sends emails. You define one with use Bamboo.Mailer, otp_app: :my_app and call deliver_now/1 or deliver_later/1 on it.
Adapter — The backend that actually transmits the email. Bamboo ships with adapters for Mandrill, SendGrid, Mailgun, and local/test usage, with many more available from the community.

Quick Look

import Bamboo.Email

new_email()
|> to("user@example.com")
|> from("app@example.com")
|> subject("Welcome!")
|> text_body("Thanks for signing up.")
|> MyApp.Mailer.deliver_now!()

Next Steps

Getting Started — Install Bamboo and send your first email
Adapters — Configure delivery for your email provider
Testing — Write tests that verify email delivery
Cheatsheet — Quick reference for common functions and patterns