Sending Email
Introduction
You may want to send email from your apps running in Mendix Cloud via, for example, the Email connector. After you have installed this, you will need to configure an SMTP server in your application. There are several options:
| Service | Mendix Cloud | Free App environment |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Simple Email Service | ||
| Gmail | ||
| Mailgun | ||
| SendGrid | ||
| Other SMTP-compatible services | ||
| Mendix Mail Servers |
For apps deployed to Mendix Cloud, you must set up a third-party mail provider to send emails from your app.
External Email Providers
In general, Mendix recommends external services because these offer specialized tools for sending emails, working with spam filters, keeping track of sent emails, and gaining insights into your target reach via analytics tools.
The Email connector from the Marketplace is compatible with all providers that offer an SMTP interface. You can also use other ways of sending email using an external service, such as REST APIs or creating your own Java actions to send email.
To use an external provider, you will need to sign up for an account with the provider and use their SMTP settings. These include the following:
- Host
- Port
- SSL/TLS
- Username
- Password
Here are some frequently used providers:
| Provider | Settings |
|---|---|
| Amazon Simple Email Service | Settings |
| Gmail | Settings, common configuration problem |
| Mailchimp Transactional Emails | Settings |
| Mailgun | Settings |
| SendGrid | Settings |
| Microsoft 365 | Settings |
Many users of free apps use the settings of their own Gmail account for convenience. There are many more email providers, most of which have SMTP compatibility.
Note that you cannot send email from Mendix Cloud over port 25. Although this port is open, it is heavily rate-limited by the infrastructure provider, so you will experience issues. This configuration cannot be changed.
Your SMTP provider needs to expose a secure port like 587, which is a best practice that most modern providers offer out of the box.
Sender and Recipient Address Requirements
Keep the following requirements in mind:
- Always use a sender address that is an existing address on which you are able to receive mail. If you use a nonexistent address as the sender address, you will not get (bounce) error messages which might be generated when mail delivery fails halfway.
- Do not invent your own nonexistent domain or local part.
- Do not use
noreply@addresses unless thatnoreply@address is a real mailbox from which you can read and process delivery errors. - Sender or recipient addresses that contain a domain name that does not exist on the internet may be rejected by the outgoing mail server.
- Sender or recipient addresses that do not contain any domain name will be rejected by the outgoing mail server.
- Do not invent your own email addresses for testing purposes. Domain names like
domain.com,email.com, andtest.comare real domain names. Likely, there is someone reading the mailbox fortest@domain.com, and they will receive emails you send from your test environment if you send them there.