How to include doctype declaration in email template using Meteor's core email package?

help
1

Greeting Meteorites!

According to most the best way to create an html template is with an xhtml transitional doctype. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional //EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
(campaignmonitor for example uses that notation for all it’s email templates) For example here’s an article https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2010/11/correct-doctype-to-use-in-html-email/

Only problem is: when using Meteor’s core email package it doesn’t allow me to send an email with a doctype declaration. To be clear - it does work without the doctype declaration - I tried it!

Here is my setup:

  1. I am storing all my email templates in a top-level private directory.
  2. I am calling the email.send method server side using the ssr:meteorhacks package to render templates with passed data.
    Here is my server side code if you are interested:

Meteor.methods({
'sendEmail':function(){
SSR.compileTemplate('htmlEmail' , Assets.getText('email/trial_ending.html'));
var emailData = {
title: "Trial Ending Soon.",
addCardUrl : "CARDURL",
year : moment().year()
};

Email.send({
to: "anpolchert@gmail.com",
from: "Us<us@example.com>",
subject: "Trial is ending.",
text: "The contents of our email in plain text.",
html: SSR.render('htmlEmail', emailData)
});
}
})

The error I receive is Error: Unexpected Doctype For whatever reason the email package doesn’t seem to recognize any doctype declaration! Anyone know what’s going on here?

Thank you and look forward to a response.
Alex

2

I fixed this with this additional method for SSR:

SSR.renderEmail = function (...args) {
	const html = SSR.render(...args);
	return `<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
${html}
</html>`;
};

And removing of the same strings from template .html files.
Imo Blaze caused the problem, because it forbid to use doctype block. Only and allowed.
PS: Also you can cache compiled template outside of the method itself to compile email once. And then only fill it with data.

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