Elastic Email
This module integrates your Drupal site with the Elastic Email service, allowing your website to send emails through their relay instead of directly from your server. This is particularly useful for cloud-hosted sites that may face spam filter issues or port restrictions, and it offers a quick and easy setup process.
Elastic Email is a mail relay service. That is, instead of your website sending mail via its own SMTP server, outgoing email is directed through the Elastic Email service and out onto the internet. This module provides plug n' play integration with the Elastic Email service. Learn more at the Elastic Email site.
Why?
Elastic Email is of particular use to cloud-hosted websites. There are three very prominent reasons to use it:
- Some cloud services (or rather, their IP address ranges) are blacklisted by anti-spam services because of the high volumes of spam emanating from their servers. For example: Amazon/AWS. That is to say, if you send email directly from AWS, there's a good chance it will be blocked by spam filters.
- Some servers have restrictions on outgoing ports, i.e. SMTP. Your website may simply be unable to use SMTP. Elastic Email uses a REST-style API over HTTPS. So, all you need open is port 443, the standard HTTPS port.
But the main reason may be that you can be up and running in less than 5 minutes total. Really. You can even get an account that lets you send 150,000 emails a month before you need to start paying. And there's no need to mess with configuring sendmail or postfix on your server: all configuration is done from one simple Drupal admin screen.
How?
It's a three-step process:
- Sign up for an Elastic Email account, by going to http://elasticemail.com and click on "Sign up" in the top right hand corner
- Once signed up, make a note of your API Key and your Elastic Email username (aka your email address), which you will need to configure the module
- Install and enable the elastic_email module
- Configure the elastic_email module with the username and API Key
And you're done. If you need more detail, take a look at README.txt in the module download.
Notes
- The config screen has a handy "Test" function to check that you're correctly configured.
- This module does not currently support sending attachments.
- You should setup a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain to authorise Elastic Email to send email on your behalf. See: https://elasticemail.com/support/user-interface/settings/spf-dkim-tracking-faq/
Roadmap
Elastic Email has a newer API version which could enhance the integration of this module further than the previous version.
I will be looking at updating the API to this new version to the 8.x version (and back porting to 7.x). You can keep an eye on progress at this meta issue - #2559167: [Meta] Provide support for the v2 API.
In addition to this the features that I am considering for the next release are listed in this meta issue - #2808413: [Meta] 8.x-3.0 release
Sponsors
This project is sponsored by Deeson.
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