Send Email With Git Actions

[nagasaikumargolla]

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HI All,

I need to send email in my actions flow on script output, As per my exploration it needs a Google Account to do that can we use Default Git Notification DL's for this ?

[arafajs]

Unfortunately, sending email directly from GitHub Actions requires authentication, usually with a Google account. Some potential options to send email without needing a Google account:

1. Use a 3rd party email service like SendGrid, Mailgun, etc. Many have free tiers and GitHub Actions libraries to simplify sending email through their APIs.
2. If you have access to an SMTP server, you can configure the GitHub Actions SMTP server and credentials to send through it.
3. For notification emails, you may be able to use the default GitHub notifications sent when an action completes. These go to the committer and anyone watching the repo.
4. For small volumes of email, you could potentially write the emails to a file during the action, then have a separate process (like a cron job) that picks up the email files and sends them.
5. You could create a simple API endpoint (e.g. serverless function) to send emails and call that from your action. This shifts the email sending out of GitHub but adds complexity.

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[jas88]

For actually sending emails, a Google or equivalent account with credentials in a Secret would work fine - I have a different use case which I think is more Github-relevant, though. Could we have a 'dummy' SMTP endpoint which doesn't actually send email, just logs it (and perhaps marks success/failure) for the run please?

Example use case: web app password reset/notification. Each CI run should, if successful, send an email to ci-run-success@runner.github.com via localhost SMTP (with a failure counterpart which marks the run as failed). Probably a numerical run setting to say this run is only successful if it sends exactly/at-least N emails to that address?