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How to Connect ExpressionEngine to a Third Party Email Delivery Service

by Jason Siffring

Has a client ever said to you, “Why didn’t I get that reset password email?” Have you ever had to wait patiently for like ten minutes to get a new member activation email? Ever lose sleep wondering if your contact form is really working? If so, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of transactional email delivery services.

What is transactional email?

Think of transactional email as any message sent to an individual based on some action they took. In the ExpressionEngine world that includes:

New member activation instructions
Forgotten password instructions
Admin notification of new comments, forum posts, entries or members
Private message notifications
User comment notifications
Tell-A-Friend notifications
Email generated from certain add-ons like Freeform, Postmaster or CartThrob.

Keep in mind that we’re not talking about email marketing, newsletters or any email that is sent in bulk. There are other services for that.

Why would I want to use a 3rd party service?

An email service gives you better logging and insight when it’s time to troubleshoot delivery issues. Did the system fail to send the email or did the message get caught in the recipient’s spam folder? That can be hard to determine without writing custom logging code.

If you’re using an email service, just log into their control panel and you’ll know right away if ExpressionEngine sent the email or not. Then you’ll know where to start troubleshooting.

Email Log Postmark’s outbound email report

Email delivery can be tricky business. It’s part art and part science and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s all painful. There are blacklists to monitor, feedback loops to process, IP addresses to warm up, logs to monitor, errors to handle, opens to track and reports to generate.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is.

Luckily for us, there are crazy people in the world who really enjoy managing email servers and they’ll send your transactional email for fractions of a penny per message.

Comparing 3rd party email services

There are a handful of reputable companies that provide transactional email delivery services. Here are a few to consider.

Amazon Simple Email Service (aka Amazon SES) is part of the cloud computing platform provided by the world’s largest online retailer.
Mailgun started as a Y Combinator company and was acquired by Rackspace in August 2012.
Mandrill is a relative newcomer. The service launched in April 2012, but was built by the folks at MailChimp, who know a thing or two about email.
Postmark is brought to you by the team at Wildbit, who you may also know as the makers of Beanstalk.
SendGrid was started in 2009 from the TechStars program. Transactional email and high-volume enterprise email is their specialty.

All of these services offer the same basic features like simple SMTP integration, full-featured APIs, reporting and a free pricing tier for lower volumes. This makes them all good candidates for integrating with your ExpressionEngine site.

Email delivery is a commodity service, so pricing is important. Let’s compare.

Service	Free Tier	Pricing Structure
Amazon SES	2,000 messages per day if you’re an EC2 customer (data transfer fees apply)	$0.10 per thousand messages plus data transfer fees
Mailgun	200 messages per day	Tiered pricing with monthly minimums ranging from $19 to $199 per month
Mandrill	400 messages per day*	Tiered pricing based on volume with no minimums
Postmark	1,000 free messages	Flat $1.50 per thousand messages
SendGrid	200 messages per day	Flat monthly fees from $9.95 to $399.95 per month based on usage. Pay as you go option of $0.10 per 1,000 emails

*Mandrill’s free tier is 12,000 messages per month. We divided by 30 for an easier comparison with the other free plans that are based on daily usage.

As you can see, each service takes a slightly different approach to pricing which makes for difficult apples-to-apples comparisons. Here are a few scenarios to save you some time and arithmetic.

Service	200 per day 6,000 per month	500 per day 15,000 per month	1000 per day 30,000 per month	2000 per day 60,000 per month
Amazon SES	$0.60 / month	$1 / month	$3 / month	$6 / month
Mailgun	Free	$19 / month	$30 / month	$59 / month
Mandrill	Free	$9.95 / month	$9.95 / month	$27.95 / month
Postmark	$9 / month	$22.50 / month	$45 / month	$90 / month
SendGrid*	Free	$1.50 / month	$3 / month	$6 / month

*SendGrid pricing based on their pay-as-you-go Lite plan.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is a low cost leader, but their control panel and setup process is a little more technical than the others. SendGrid’s pay-as-you-go plan is also very competitive. Mandrill has the most generous free tier at 12,000 messages per month. However, none of these plans will break the bank assuming a low to moderate message volume.

There’s really no reason not to use one of these services. So, let’s set one up.

How do I configure EE?

Sure, you could write custom code that uses an API to send your messages. But, all of these services have a secret weapon that makes them very simple to integrate with ExpressionEngine; Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (aka SMTP).

SMTP is a standard internet protocol for delivering email that was established back in the 80’s. ExpressionEngine supports SMTP out of the box. How great is that?

Before we get too far you’ll want to make sure that your web host supports SMTP, but most do. For a quick check, go to Tools > Utilities > PHP Info and search for SMTP. If you see SMTP configured in PHP there’s a good chance your host is set up for it.

Now, configure ExpressionEngine. Don’t be scared. It’s easy.

In the control panel, go to Admin > Email Configuration
Change Email Protocol to SMTP
Enter your service’s SMTP Server Address, Username and Password as they specify
Submit and save your settings

Email Configuration There is no step #5!

Now, ExpressionEngine should be configured to send all of its email through the 3rd party service. To test it go to Tools > Communicate and try sending an email to yourself. You should receive the email right away and see the email in your email service’s reporting dashboard.

If not, go to Admin > Email Configuration and set Enable Email Debugging to Yes and give it another shot. Then go to Tools > Logs > Email Console Log and look for anything suspicious.

Is it working? Great!

Rest easy knowing that a whole team of people are working behind the scenes to make sure your email is delivered.

Posted on Feb 26, 2013

Filed Under: How-To,

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About Jason Siffring

Jason started his career at Procter & Gamble, survived the first dot com bubble at a startup in Silicon Valley and provided IT consulting to Fortune 500 companies for ten years at Loudcloud, EDS and VMware. He owns Surprise Highway, a web development studio in Chicago that specializes in ExpressionEngine and custom PHP development and co-hosts the Chicago EE user group. Follow him on Twitter @siffring.

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Any pointers on getting Mailgun to work on EE on Rackspace Cloud Server?

Posted by iapparatus on 2013-09-13 15:08:06

You may have to use this add-on to get it working: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/es...

Posted by Nick on 2013-05-31 09:05:39 Thanks Alex for the tip off and Derek for the excellent extension! Already testing a copy and going great so far. I can still see a latency with sends which is to be expected, but it's quicker without a doubt, plus we have proper fallback this way should there be an issue. Good work Derek.
Posted by Nick Cobley on 2013-02-27 20:26:39 Nick Colbey - as circumstance would have it, I just released that very extension today: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/escort
Posted by Derek Hogue on 2013-02-27 12:41:37 Thanks for the great write-up, Jason. With respect to configuration options, Derek Hogue (@mrherbivore, Amphibian Design) just released Escort today. It relies on the HTTP APIs instead of SMTP and supports Mandrill, MailGun, PostageApp, Postmark, and SendGrid. Looks pretty great! http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/escort Could be a good way to avoid potential SMTP-related pitfalls @Nick mentioned.
Posted by Alex Kendrick on 2013-02-27 12:40:39 Perfect timing. I was just looking into services today and ran across this article. I've been using EE for years and never thought about integrating a third-party service for this. Thanks for the detail and pricing.
Posted by Jon Livingston on 2013-02-26 20:48:07 I've been doing it for years this way, it's an absolute no brainer. A couple of things to be aware of though. Firstly in changing mail to be delivered via sendmail to an SMTP server, you do shift some of the time involved in delivering the mail to the frontend. So someone fills out a form on a website, or performs any action that requires EE to instantly fire an email, you will notice a delay before the it's complete for the user. So for example someone is completing a webform, you may see a 5 second delay give or take a few seconds before the thank you page displays. This is because when you use sendmail, the email is just spooled to the local server for delivery, nothing actually happens other than adding your email to a queue. The local server then handles the rest of the delivery behind the scenes. Using SMTP, we have to open a port to the remote server, Postmark in my case, authenticate, then actually pass on the message to them, including uploading any attachments. All of this being over the internet rather than locally on the server introduces delays. I have seen a few cases where I suspect the end user filling out a form maybe hits the back button then submits again as they thought nothing was happening. The other thing to note is when using sendmail, if there's any problem with that delivery, it will retry if it's a non fatal error, and worse case you still have logs to see what happened. An example of this going wrong is when I accidentally blocked port 25 outgoing on the sever once, emails were failing to be delivered, the 3rd party service was never contacted so no logs there, and nothing locally either as I'm not using sendmail. Two solutions to this. First is to write an extension, which I keep meaning to pay someone to do, that will take over EE's email handling and delivery the email via an API instead. There will likely still be a delay but not as significant, plus I can then build in my own error handling should there be a failure to deliver it to the 3rd party service. The second way is how we do it now. If you have full control over the box your hosting on you just setup sendmail or whatever your local smtp server is, to delivery mail to a smart host. So EE continues to deliver email to sendmail locally. Sendmail then queues the email like normal, but rather than deliver it directly, just hands it over to your 3rd party mail provider. Using this method you get all the benefits of speed an logging in using sendmail, and significantly enhanced deliverability and reporting that comes from 3rd party mail services.
Posted by Nick Cobley on 2013-02-26 20:33:52 Thanks Jason, I can't believe this has been available and I never thought about it before. Probably 90% of my client troubleshooting problems with EE have been around email delivery - this would have made it sooo much easier to find out where the trouble started. Great article.
Posted by Ant on 2013-02-26 17:34:51 @Ant, Freeform and any other EE addons that use the EE email class will be sent through the 3rd party service. We use it for our Freeform contact forms quite regularly.
Posted by Jason Siffring on 2013-02-26 17:23:38 Does this apply to forms using Solspace Freeform as well? I.e. do they send via EE's SMTP settings? Thanks
Posted by Ant on 2013-02-26 16:56:14 We're using SendGrid currently, and we like it pretty well. I haven't tried any others, so that's not a comparative analysis, just a note that I've been satisfied with its capabilities and reporting mechanisms. A note on its pricing is that if you are a Rackspace customer, you might qualify for Bronze (40,000) emails/mo for free, too. Though I do wonder how long that offer will exist, given their acquisition of Mailgun last year.
Posted by Derek Jones on 2013-02-26 16:07:37 Awesome - that really was easy. Tested and tracking within minutes. Thank you!
Posted by Liam Crean on 2013-02-26 10:57:27 Fantastic. So simple. This will be Brilliant for anyone with Ecommerce set up. I'm going to see if it works with CartThrob now. Ta.
Posted by Liam Crean on 2013-02-26 10:45:52 This article actually prompted me to start using a transactional email service on devot-ee.com. Took less than 5 minutes to get it set up to use Mandrill.
Posted by Ryan Masuga on 2013-02-26 10:25:59 Thanks @ryan. I found it difficult to compare pricing apples-to-apples just by looking at their sales sites. Hopefully the comparisons help. @John Henry, it's great to hear you got it up and running so quickly! It really is pretty easy.
Posted by Jason Siffring on 2013-02-26 10:22:38 This is great and thanks for sharing. I frequently came across Postmark and never knew it's full intention as an app. Now I do, I had it setup in 10 minutes flat and already testing outbound email. I have a site with a perfect use case for this where there is always doubt surrounding member emails, activations, notifications etc.
Posted by John Henry Donovan on 2013-02-26 10:11:47 Well written article, Jason. Thanks for the pricing breakdowns, too.
Posted by Ryan Masuga on 2013-02-26 10:02:17

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