Quick Start

Quick start guide for creating a novem e-mail.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have a registered novem account and the novem cli installed.

You’re also required to have a valid and confirmed e-mail registered for your account.

In addition if you want to send e-mails to anyone but your registered e-mail, you need a basic or better subscription.

Creating an e-mail

To create a new novem e-mail, simply use the novem cli with the create and mail flags (-C -m <email_name>) in your preferred terminal.

<email_name> represents the identifier for the e-mail and will be used when updating content, recipients, sending etc.

# create a novem e-mail called email_name
novem -m <email_name> -C

Recipients

Novem supports the same set of e-mail recipients as regular email: to, cc and bcc.

The from name will always be the profile name of the user creating the e-mail and the from address will be <username>@usr.novem.no. It’s possible to specify that a reply_to address should be supplied, referring to the user registered e-mail.

To set the recipients of an e-mail the --to, --cc and --bcc flags can be used. The recipiets can be either novem users @novem_username, novem groups +org~group/@user~group or regular email username@domain.ext/User Name<user@domain.ext>.

For details and restrictions regarding sending of novem emails please check out the recipients page.

# send e-mail to novem user
novem -m <email_name> --to @novem_username

# send e-mail to self
novem -m <email_name> --to me

# send e-mail to a novem group
novem -m <email_name> --to +org_name~org_groupname
novem -m <email_name> --to @novem_username~user_groupname

# send e-mail to address
novem -m <email_name> --to user@domain.ext
novem -m <email_name> --to "User Name <user@domain.ext>"
novem -m <email_name> --to "User Name <user@domain.ext>;Other User Name<other@domain.ext>"

# send e-mail to address, cc self
novem -m <email_name> --to "User Name <user@domain.ext>" --cc me

# send e-mail to address, bcc self
novem -m <email_name> --to "User Name <user@domain.ext>" --bcc me

# send e-mail to address, cc address
novem -m <email_name> --to "User Name <user@domain.ext>" --cc other@domain.ext

Content

The content of a novem e-mail is written in novem flavored markdown with a few special instructions for e-mail, in particular e-mail specific sections. More details can be found in the content section of the e-mail documentation.

The easiest way to create content is to create a local text file on your disk containing the information. For this section we assume the content is in a file called email.md.

We strongly recommend that you start all e-mails with a top level section defining the e-mail subject and preview text.

Once you’ve written your content you can add it to an email by either writing it to standard in or specifying the novem end point.

# Writing data on standard in
cat email.md | novem -m <email_name>

# Specifying a content file
novem -m <email_name> -w content @email.md

Sample content of email.md

---
  subject: E-mail subject line
  preview: preview text that shows up in list but not e-mail
---

Text that shows up in the e-mail body.

Adding plots

To add novem plots to the e-mail just include a special type of section called vis sections.

Novem vis sections consists of a special section delimiter === <type>:

Some written text before the novem vis section

=== plot
  name: /u/novem_demo/p/example_visits            # reference to novem plot
  align: center
  width: 100%
===

Some text after novem vis section

Sending

To send an e-mail the user can use the send -S or test -T flags to the novem command.

The -S flag will send the e-mail to all users (to, cc, bcc) whilst the -T flag will only send an e-mailt to the registered e-mail of the current user for testing purposes.

# send e-mail to all registered recipients to, cc, bcc
novem -m <email_name> -S

# send e-mail to user registered e-mail, ignore to, cc, bcc
novem -m <email_name> -T

# send e-mail to user registered e-mail, ignore to, cc, bcc, --to takes presendence
novem -m <email_name> --to -S

Examples

A daily e-mail of webpage visitors

Content of draft.txt.

---
  subject: Daily e-mail summary
  preview: Small summary that shows in preveiw but not in the body of the e-mail
---

Good morning User,

yesterday there were 4,323 unique users who visited your webpage.

=== plot
  name: /u/novem_demo/p/example_visits
  align: center
  width: 100%
===

---
  type: section
  title: Section title
---

# create a new novem e-mail
novem -m daily_visitor_mail -C

# add me to the "to" recipient list
novem -m daily_visitor_mail --to me

# write the content of the draft.txt to the mail
cat draft.txt | novem -m daily_visitor_mail

# send the e-mail
novem -m daily_visitor_mail -S


# shorthand
cat draft.txt | novem -C -m daily_visitor_mail --to me -S
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