
Email Tools for Developers
These free tools from the email experts at SparkPost make it easy to build and check your app’s emails.
Integrating with a cloud email API is the most performant approach for implementing notifications and other transactional emails. In this article, you will learn:
An email API (application programming interface) gives applications access to the functionality available in an email platform, such as generating and sending transactional emails, manipulating templates, and enabling access to email metrics.
While many applications use basic SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) support for sending email, developers can also leverage an email platform’s APIs to gain programmatic access to basic email sending, and also access additional capabilities not offered by legacy protocols.
SMTP, the standard protocol used to send email, is a traditional case of “easy to learn, hard to master.” While it’s straightforward to send simple messages one at a time, it is more complicated to assemble and manage rich content, and sending at volume requires knowing how to properly scale your messaging infrastructure and follow all the best practices imposed by the various ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to ensure your message doesn’t end up in the spam folder. It’s easier to let someone else handle the sending and rely on an API to perform necessary email functions.
When used with cloud email delivery, an email API makes it easy to send email, particularly transactional messages, from your app or website—without needing to manage servers and their operational requirements. Instead, your app relies on the email API to manage things such as message assembly, message sending, and reporting.
An email API also enables you to easily access many kinds of metrics, such as how many messages delivered, how many messages were rejected by the ISP (and why), and how many recipients opened a message and clicked on its links. Typically, a cloud email platform will offer a dashboard you can use to easily view this data.
Cloud email delivery is an example of SaaS, which stands for “software as a service.” Cloud email delivery platforms excel in the sending and management of transactional messages, given the need to send them continuously, 24 hours a day. They’re built with safeguards in place to protect against denial-of-service attacks, Internet outages, weather events, and other problems that can cause email sending problems. No one wants their email system to fail on a busy day, such as Cyber Monday.
Email notifications and transactional emails are a perfect use case for an email API. Typical examples include:
In general, the process of generating and sending a notification or transactional email with an email API looks something like this:
In the past, sending such emails would require the creation and maintenance of physical servers, with the need to employ people well-versed in the associated technical requirements. In addition, each transactional event would require the generation and sending of a fully-formed email message, an inefficient process that was susceptible to errors and didn’t scale well.
Today, a cloud email delivery service requires the resources of a programming team that’s already working on a web-based service and/or mobile app. They simply need to plug their code into an API. Once that work is done, the developers can continue putting their main focus on creating differentiated value for that service and/or app, which directly impacts a company’s revenue stream, and let the email service perform its job.
In addition to notifications and other transactional messages, API-driven email is well suited for:
UP NEXT: Introduction to Growth Surfaces
SaaS product managers must identify key features that are “growth surfaces” that drive user engagement and other business metrics. Here’s why.
Develop your email industry expertise and master best practices with SparkPost’s email resources.
These free tools from the email experts at SparkPost make it easy to build and check your app’s emails.
Learn how third-party data shows the deliverability difference between SparkPost and also-ran cloud service providers yields hard, bottom-line benefits.
This practical course is a great way to get started understanding email deliverability and how to measure email performance.
This great ebook explains 10 things you might not realize about email. Download the survival guide to email today.