Sending one email to multiple email addresses without them all appearing in the To line

[gavrichards]

We're finally upgrading from SDK v2.8 to v7 🎉

In our wrapper for the old version, we had this which handles sending an email either with single/multiple recipients in the 'To' line, or sending the email separately so each recipient only sees their own address in the To line.

if ($separate) {
    if (is_array($to)) {
        foreach($to as $toAddress) {
            $this->email->addSmtpapiTo($toAddress);
        }
    } else {
        $this->email->addSmtpapiTo($to);
    }

} else {
    $this->email->addTo($to);
}

Is there an equivalent for v7? Or should we instead be sending completely independent emails?

Any help would be appreciated.

[thinkingserious]

Hello @gavrichards,

I think this is the use case needed. Please let me know.

With Best Regards,

Elmer

[gavrichards]

Hi Elmer
Is that the same as calling addTo() multiple times? I've written a wrapper which does that, but wanted an option to specify the email must be sent individually to each person in the To line.

[AleMadLei]

@gavrichards , I'm not sure if this will work for you, but what I've been doing is adding personalizations to the mail object.

  // Previously initializated personalization object. 
  $personalization->addTo($to);
  
  // Adds it to the email. 
  $mail->addPersonalization($personalization);

This way I get the contacts to only see their email address on the message.

[thinkingserious]

Hello @gavrichards,

Please see @alemadlei-tech's response. Thanks!

@alemadlei-tech,

Thanks for taking the time to share your solution!

[gavrichards]

Thanks both, I'll give this a try and report back.

[gavrichards]

@alemadlei-tech @thinkingserious Hi
I've tried this, and this is how my code looks now:

// Example data to pass in:
$to = [
  'me@mycompany.com',
  'someone@else.org'
];

$separate = true;

// Send an individual email to each recipient, or send with everyone in the 'to' line?
if ($separate) {
    foreach ($to as $address) 
    {
        //$this->email->addSmtpapiTo($address);

        $personalization = new SendGrid\Mail\Personalization();
        $personalization->addTo(new SendGrid\Mail\To($address));

        $this->email->addPersonalization($personalization);
    }

} else {
    foreach($to as $address) 
    {
        $this->email->addTo($address);
    }
}

However I'm receiving this error:

{"errors":[{"message":"The to array is required for all personalization objects, and must have at least one email object with a valid email address.","field":"personalizations.0.to","help":"http://sendgrid.com/docs/API_Reference/Web_API_v3/Mail/errors.html#message.personalizations.to"}]}

Can you see where I might be going wrong?

[AleMadLei]

@gavrichards, depending on how you instantiated your mail object, it might contain an empty personalization object.

So, there's a chance your email has 2 personalization objects or more, with the first one with no recipients. Do a print_r() and check the output.

[gavrichards]

@alemadlei-tech It's instantiated like this. I couldn't find any documentation on how to do the personalization object.

$this->email = new SendGrid\Mail\Mail();

[AleMadLei]

@gavrichards,

You should be able to do

print_r($this->email)

before sending it and from the output, if i'm not mistaken, you will see that the first item in the personalization contains no recipients.

Also, I didn't find any documentation for it either, but what I did is go trough the code and found about that.

[gavrichards]

Yes - you're right. In this case, there's 3 personalization objects.
So the first one is provided by default presumably, and then I've added two more. In which case, this approach is probably not going to work.

[personalization:SendGrid\Mail\Mail:private] => Array
        (
            [0] => SendGrid\Mail\Personalization Object
                (
                    [tos:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [ccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [bccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [subject:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [headers:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [substitutions:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [custom_args:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [send_at:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                )

            [1] => SendGrid\Mail\Personalization Object
                (
                    [tos:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => Array
                        (
                            [0] => SendGrid\Mail\To Object
                                (
                                    [name:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                    [email:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => ***@***.com
                                    [substitutions:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                    [subject:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                )

                        )

                    [ccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [bccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [subject:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [headers:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [substitutions:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [custom_args:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [send_at:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                )

            [2] => SendGrid\Mail\Personalization Object
                (
                    [tos:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => Array
                        (
                            [0] => SendGrid\Mail\To Object
                                (
                                    [name:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                    [email:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => ***@***.com
                                    [substitutions:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                    [subject:SendGrid\Mail\EmailAddress:private] => 
                                )

                        )

                    [ccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [bccs:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [subject:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [headers:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [substitutions:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [custom_args:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                    [send_at:SendGrid\Mail\Personalization:private] => 
                )

        )

[AleMadLei]

@gavrichards, yes, but you need to add something to the email in the constructor. Check the constructor logic, you should be able to set the subject for the email and that would cause the personalization object to remain empty.

[thinkingserious]

Thanks for helping out @alemadlei-tech!

Please let us know if you run into further issues @gavrichards.

[gavrichards]

@alemadlei-tech Even if you add the subject to the constructor, you still get an error saying

The to array is required for all personalization objects, and must have at least one email object with a valid email address.

This is because the first personalization object just contains the subject, and then the other two personalization objects contain a populated tos object.

I think ultimately what I set out to do originally isn't going to work with this new SDK. I think it would be best if I reconsidered the approach completely.
My feedback to @thinkingserious would be to perhaps have some upgrade/migration notes, and in this case state that there isn't a direct replacement for the addSmtpapiTo() method seen in the earlier SDK.

[gavrichards]

I've got this working, but it's a bit long-winded.

if ($this->sendSeparately)
{
    $i = 0;
    foreach($this->to as $address)
    {
        if ($i == 0) {
            // Add the first address to the existing personalization that is created by default
            $this->mail
                ->addTo($address);

        } else {
            // Add subsequent addresses to new personalizations
            $personalization = new SendGrid\Mail\Personalization();
            $personalization
                ->addTo(new SendGrid\Mail\To($address));

            $this->mail
                ->addPersonalization($personalization);
        }

        $i++;
    }

} else {
    foreach($this->to as $address)
    {
        $this->mail
            ->addTo($address);
    }
}

I have a related question now though. I'm trying to add a custom arg.
It says in the docblock for addCustomArg:

Add a custom arg to a Personalization or Mail object

If you don't provide a Personalization object or index, the custom arg will be global to entire message. Note that custom args added to Personalization objects override global custom args.

My problem is whenever I call this, it always adds the custom arg to the first personalization object.
But looking at the code for this function, I can't see how it would ever populate the Mail object's custom_args ? It seems to always update either the first personalization object, or whichever is specified. @thinkingserious is there a way to set custom args globally on the Mail object?

[thinkingserious]

Thanks for sharing your solution @gavrichards!

I think this is the function you need for global custom arguments.

[gavrichards]

@thinkingserious Thanks - so the explanation comment on addCustomArg is incorrect?

[thinkingserious]

Yes, thanks for catching that! I'm going to classify this issue as a bug and put on our backlog for a fix. For this issue to gain priority in our backlog, we need additional +1's or a PR. When we receive a PR, that provides the biggest jump in priority.

[gavrichards]

Thanks @thinkingserious :)