Sending email from your website
Sellcloud enables Postfix so your apps can send mail from your server; however, ensuring 100% email delivery yourself can be tricky. So email coming from your server is not marked as spam, you can sign up for SendGrid and integrate its mail delivery service with Postfix. SendGrid is a mail-delivery service that provides email infrastructure to support any outbound messages from your app, such as transactional emails, online purchase receipts, sign-up verifications, marketing mails in bulk, password reminders, etc..
What Is SendGrid?
SendGrid delivers your transactional and marketing emails through the world's largest cloud-based email delivery platform. SendGrid has a 30-day free trial in which you can send up to 40,000 emails. After that, you can continue the free trial forever for free and send up to 100 emails/day.
If you need more emails than that, their Essentials plan starts at $14.95/month and you can send up to 40,000 emails per month. The cost per extra email is $0.001. But you can also upgrade to a higher plan to save more money.
Again, while there are different free SMTP services, I'm going to choose SendGrid for this tutorial because:
- It's free forever for up to 100 emails per day, which should work for most WordPress sites.
- It offers an API that gives you a simpler way to send emails instead of needing to enter standalone SMTP server credentials.
- I've been using it on my own sites for a while and have had a great experience.
The basic process goes like this:
- First, signup for a free trial at SendGrid.com. Then verify your account by clicking on the confirmation email you receive.
- Access your SendGrid API key.
- Use a WordPress SMTP plugin to configure your site to send its emails using the SendGrid SMTP API.
Let's go through it in more details step by step