How to Use SendGrid With Pitchbox

4 min With Alex Gopshtein Section 3 Lesson 14

What you'll learn

SendGrid sends mail but can't receive it, which is the detail that trips most people up: you'll need a separate IMAP server for replies, whether that's Rackspace, Gmail, or your own. This walks through the whole connection, including the setting nobody guesses: your SMTP username is the literal phrase API key.

Transcript

In this video, I'll show you how to set up a SendGrid with Pitchbox. So the way SendGrid integrates with Pitchbox is through the SMTP relay. The first thing we need to do is set up senders. I could do this through the marketing tab where I have the same ability to do it through settings. I'm already here. I have a couple of email accounts set up. The way you do that is you just create a sender and specify you obviously have to authenticate the domain into SendGrid. You specify the can spam information, which is the address and stuff, and then you have to obviously go through verification to make sure that you have a ability to send from those emails at this domain.

So this is the responsibility of SendGrid. Then the way we integrate it into Pitchbox is we'll go to email API and here integration guide. In the integration guide, we have two choices, web API or SMTP relay. We'll choose the SMTP relay. And here you give your API key a name and we'll just call it PVTest. I'll create a key. Now I'm going to copy that key. I'm going to jump over to Pitchbox. And when I'm in Pitchbox, I'm going to create an account, right? Because I want to connect this account. And I'll choose other put in the name. So I have a fictitious email address in there, and it's going to be Philip.

And I'll go to advanced. This particular email account is for the IMAP, right? So we can send emails with SMTP through SendGrid, but we can't receive them. So we still need to specify an IMAP server for Pitchbox. Now I'm doing IMAP SMTP, you can connect Gmail if you wanted to and then receive emails through Gmail, but send them through SendGrid, you can do that. In which case, you basically select Gmail, you go through the authentication process, and then you change the setting of that particular email account. And you say, yes, I'm going to be sending using SendGrid, but receiving through Gmail.

But in this case, it's Rackspace and Rackspace is IMAP is secure.emailsrvr.com. I know their port is 993, we're going to use SSL. Our username is this and then the password and the copy from my clipboard from a text file I have. Now for the SMTP servers for SendGrid now, we'll go back here, and they're giving us that. So we'll copy that into clipboard, jump back in. Port is 465. We will use SSL. They give you those ports. They specify you can use any of those ports, we do recommend 465 for SSL. username is going to be API key. And then the password is this, right?

So again, we'll copy this over. And the username is not an email address. It's API key, that's the way SendGrid has it. And then we'll paste in the password, which is the API key that the key password that they gave us. We'll hit Next. Pitchbox connects right in. And then you can set other things up, and such as the inbox and all the other good stuff. And then the mailer already have set up. I have the option, some of the syncing on the mail server, I'll hit Save. And that's it. I have my email connected with SendGrid receiving through Rackspace. And there you have it.