Sparkpost and Alpha Five - Fantastic

Date: September 3rd 2017.

Sparkpost and Alpha Five... 

Part One:

Okay, now that you have done lots of work in Alpha Five and you have many clients under your belt, you are thinking - "Hey how about mass email marketing.. sounds like its about time."

Yes it's about time.

I am assuming you have done text messaging via Twilio earlier and now ready for email stuff.

The first thing you need to do is to sign up with an email service provider.  There are few out there, but this is about Sparkpost.

So I am going to deal with that only.

Go to www.sparkpost.com and check it out. You can try for free or get started for free. I did get started for free.  They give you about 25000 emails per day, for me that is lots of emails. Once you get the hang of it then you can upgrade anytime you want. So, I would say sign up for free account. Nothing fancy, no money. Just free as in free.

Once you get signed up then you can send an email via their sandbox account but that is only good for 5 emails, pittance, because you need more than that to complete all testing.  So what can you do.

Well, as far as sparkpost is concerned from address a sending domain. So go to your dashboard and create a new shiny domain.  They need to verify you hold that account before you can send email via that address. When you create the domain it says unverified. In order to verify you will need do either of these two steps.  You can verify with SMTP relay, meaning they will send an email to postmaster or abuse @ your domain.com. So you should have one of those set in your website.  I had postmaster@....com and the email came to it and verified to start sending.  Or you can copy paste the DNS setting which according to them is better, but I did not lose anything by the email method. So do the way you like, but at the end your domain ( that is the from address ) needs to be verified.

Once verified, that account will say verified, ready for sending. Now you are halfway thru with sparkpost.

Next you need to generate an api key. 

Go to your dashboard and scroll down, it will indicate the progress. You have created sending domain and verified.  Next click on the manage api keys and generate a new api key. Now here is the important part. Once you close that window you cannot get that key back. so copy and paste it in at least two places with some kind of name that you can recognize and recall the api key..

Now you are almost there in sparkpost.

There are several ways to send emails with sparkpost and they give you example codes.

The example codes include cURL, NodeJs and C# among other languages. You can also send via SMTP_Relay, meaning using standard smtp open, send and close methods. I am going to talk about SMTP_Relay since it is the easiest of all. There is nothing fancy no need to work hard and just few lines of code you can send one or many emails as you want. But eventually I will try to master javascript way of doing things, but that is for down the road.

Next, we need to work on alpha to complete the rest of the stuff so we can send one or many emails we need.

That is for next week...

Stay tuned.