Transactional email services

This guide covers automated email delivery for your applications. If you need to set up personal email hosting for your domain, see Email hosting instead.

# Sendmail is not an option any more

Emails sent via the traditional PHP mail function↗ are treated as anonymous and rejected by major providers, so fortrabbit does not support sendmail. Here is what that code looked like:

$to      = 'firstname.lastname@gmail.com';
$subject = 'Welcome to our service';
$message = 'hello, nice to have you here …';
$headers = 'From: webmaster@mycoolapp.com'

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

This does not work any more, since such mails are sent anonymously — not from a real mail server. Your email will simply be ignored by big providers. Sendmail is disabled with our hosting service for this reason, see quirks.

# About transactional emails

Transactional emails are automated, personalized messages sent by your application in response to user actions, such as account confirmations, password resets, and invoices. Unlike bulk newsletters, each message is individually triggered and targeted at a specific recipient. Examples include:

1. double-opt in email to confirm an account
2. an email with the monthly invoice
3. an email to reset a password to login to your service again

Commercial transactional mail offerings are here to help. Besides an SMTP interface you'll get: an easy to use restful API, instant delivery, help with setting up your DKIM and SPF records for your domain, email templates, logging, statistics, bounce alerts, click tracking, inbound emails and much more.