Is variable scope combined with promises good practice?

I often see code like this:

(the code is completely composed from scratch)

something.someFunction('foobar')
    .then(function(user) {
        var email = user.email();
        return user.getSomething();
    })
    .then(function(something) {
        var metadata = something.metadata();
        return user.getRelation(metadata);
    })
    .then(function(relation) {
        return email.send(relation, metadata);
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
        console.log(err);
    })
;

      

        
        
        
      

    

Is this common practice? Personally, I find it not very clean and not readable. What are the alternatives? All I could think of was something like putting all the necessary things into an object and passing that instead. However, this can be very large with long promises:

something.someFunction('foobar')
    .then(function(user) {
        return {
            email: user.email(),
            something: user.getSomething(),
        };
    })
    .then(function(state) {
        return {
            email: state.email,
            metadata: something.metadata(),
            relation: user.getRelation(metadata),
            // 'something' is not needed anymore ...
        };
    })
    .then(function(state) {
        return {
            result: email.send(state.relation, state.metadata),
            // and everything else that might be needed later on ...
        };
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
        console.log(err);
    })
;

      

        
        
        
      

    

Will it still work as expected? If not, what is the way to create something like this? Again, I just came up with this code from scratch as a pure illustrative example.