Transactional email services
With fortrabbit you can not use sendmail. Meet transactional mail services.
# Sendmail is not an option any more
Back in the days you might have just used the PHP mail function like so:
$to = 'firstname.lastname@gmail.com'; $subject = 'Welcome to awesome service'; $message = 'hello, nice to have you here …'; $headers = 'From: webmaster@mycoolapp.com' mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);php
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
Your web application needs to send personalized, triggered emails. For example:
- double-opt in email to confirm an account
- an email with the monthly invoice
- an email to reset a password to login to your service again
This is not a newsletter where one person is sending out the same mail to a bulk of receivers, but a service that sends personalized mails one by one.
Commercial transactional mail offerings are here help. Beside 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.
# The providers
Here are some commercial services for transactional emails. Sorry, I can't tell you which is the best one — haven't got the time to test them all. Well known are:
Not so well known but also available:
Special mention goes top mailtrap which is a service dedicated to bring you safe email testing with a fake SMTP server to test and view the mails your application is sending. We are using Postmark app ourselves but beside that we have no other business relation to any of the services mentioned here. No affiliate links.
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