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Production Settings with SendGrid

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If we're going to send emails with SendGrid... we... probably need an account! Head to sendgrid.com and click to register. I'll create a shiny new symfonycasts username, a thought-provoking password, my email and I am hopefully not a robot... and if I am... I'm at least a self-aware robot. Does that count? And... create account! Oh man! Registration step 2! Let's fill these out and... done!

SendGrid just sent us an email to verify my account. I've already got my inbox open and ready. There it is! I'll click to confirm my email and... we're good!

Creating the SendGrid API Key

Back on the SendGrid "guide" page, on a high-level, we need some sort of API key or username & password that we can use to send through our new account. Click "Start" and then "Choose" the SMTP Relay option.

Yea, I know, I know: SendGrid says that the Web API method is recommended. Most Cloud providers give you these two options: send through the traditional SMTP relay or use some custom API endpoints that they expose. They recommend the API way because, if you're creating all of your emails by hand, it's probably easier: just POST your subject, to, from, body, etc to an API endpoint and it takes care of creating the email behind-the-scenes. The API probably also has a few extra, SendGrid-specific features if you need to do something really custom.

But because Mailer - and really the Mime component - are handling all of the complexity of creating the email for us, it's much easier to use the SMTP relay.

Finally, it's time to create an API key that will authenticate us over SMTP. Give the key a name - just so you can recognize what it's for 1 year from now when we've completely forgotten. And hit "Create Key".

Check out our beautiful new SendGrid API key. Hmm, actually, down here, it's called a "Password". In reality, this is a SendGrid API key - you could use it to send emails through their RESTful API. But because SMTP authentication works via a username and password, SendGrid tells us to use apikey as the username and this as the password. It also tells us exactly what server and port to use. This is everything we need. Copy the password.

Configuring the SMTP Way vs the SendGrid Transport Way

In .env.local, we could use all that info to fill in the normal smtp://username:password@server:port format. That would totally work.

Or, we could use the SendGrid transport to make life easier: just smtp:// - the long API key - then @sendgrid.

MAILER_DSN=smtp://API_KEY@sendgrid

The sendgrid transport is just a small wrapper around the SMTP transport to make life easier: because it knows that the username is always apikey... and that the server is always smtp.sendgrid.net, we don't need to fill those in.

In Symfony 4.4, the new syntax will look like this:

sendgrid://KEY@default

By the way, the SendGrid transport can use SMTP behind the scenes or make API requests to the SendGrid API. In fact, most transports are like this. Symfony chooses the best one by default - usually smtp - but you could force it to use the API by saying sendgrid+api://.

Sending an Email!

Tip

SendGrid now requires that you "authenticate" your from address before you can send any emails. We'll talk more about "sender authentication" in the next chapter, but to send your first email, you will need to do a few extra steps:

1) Follow https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/sending-email/sender-verification/ to verify a real email address. For development, you can use your personal email.

2) In src/Service/Mailer.php, update the setFrom() line to use the email you just configured, instead of alienmailcarrier@example.com.

Ok team - let's try this! Back in the browser, tell SendGrid that we have updated our settings and click "Next".

At this point, unless we've made a mistake, it should work: SendGrid is waiting for us to try it. So... let's do that! Back on our site, hit enter on the registration page. This time, because we're going to send a real email - yay! - I'll register with a real address: ryan@symfonycasts.com. Type in a fun password, agree to terms and... go!

No errors!? Ho, ho! Because it probably worked. Tell SendGrid to "Verify Integration" - that makes it look for the email we just sent.

Our Message is Spammy

While we're waiting... ah! I see a new message in my inbox! And it looks perfect. If you don't see anything, double-check your spam folder. Because... the email we sent is actually super spammy. Why? See how we're sending from alienmailer@example.com? Do we own the example.com domain? No! And even if we did, we have not proven that our SendGrid account is allowed to send emails on behalf of that domain. This is the biggest mistake you can make when sending emails and we'll talk more about how to fix it in a few minutes.

But first, back on SendGrid... hmm. It didn't see my email? It definitely sent. Hit to verify again - sometimes this works quickly... but I've also had to hit this button 3-4 times before. So... keep trying.

Finally, it works. Next, our great new email system... will probably result in pretty much every email we send going straight to Spam. Wah, wah. We need to prove that we are allowed to send from whatever domain our "from" address is set to. Let's tackle "Sender authentication".