Setting Up Transactional Email Sending

In this article, we detail the technical connection data for setting up the SMTP shipping service, but if you want a non-technical explanation about transactional emails with examples and best practices, take a look at our guide.

Using Acumbamail as an SMTP gateway will allow you to use our servers to effectively deliver transactional emails generated by your web platform to your users. In addition, Acumbamail will provide you with statistics that will allow you to understand your users' behavior towards these emails. This type of service can only be used with email rates based on the number of emails or prepaid credit packages and not with rates based on the number of subscribers.

To hire this service, you will first need to have contracted a rate per number of email shipments or a prepaid credit package, and then contact our support team to enable the service immediately.

The use of this service is only allowed for the sending of transactional emails. These shipments are registration confirmations, personalized notifications to the user and, in short, any email that is the product of a direct interaction of the user with your web platform. Promotional emails can be sent using our newsletter sending tool, the prices of which you can see here.

Connection data

To use the SMTP server you have to choose the type of authentication, you can choose a plain port or with TLS/SSL. To use our SMTP server you must use the following connection data:

To start the configuration, go to the SMTP section within the left side menu of Acumbamail:

• In Configure, click on the Configure SMTP button to access the connection data you need for integration:

Configuration examples in different languages

Configuration example in Django

To send emails through Acumbamail with the send_mail function of django, you only have to include the following parameters in the configuration (usually in settings.py). Remember to replace LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL and PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL with the ones that correspond in your case.

# settings.py

EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.acumbamail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL'
EMAIL_PORT = 25 #alternative port: 25252

# send_mail call example

send_mail("Subject", "Body", "example@mailfrom.com" , "example@mailto.com", fail_silently=True)<br>

Configuration example in Java

To send emails through our SMTP server using the Java programming language you can do so by following this example. Remember to replace LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL and PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL with the ones that correspond in your case.

import javax.mail.*;
import javax.mail.internet.*;
import javax.mail.Authenticator;
import javax.mail.PasswordAuthentication;
import java.util.Properties;

public class test1 {

    private static final String SMTP_HOST_NAME = "smtp.acumbamail.com";
    private static final String SMTP_AUTH_USER = "LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL";
    private static final String SMTP_AUTH_PWD  = "PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL";

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
       new test1().test();
    }

    public void test() throws Exception{
        Properties props = new Properties();
        props.put("mail.transport.protocol", "smtp");
        props.put("mail.smtp.host", SMTP_HOST_NAME);
        props.put("mail.smtp.port", 25);
        props.put("mail.smtp.auth", "true");
        //props.put("mail.smtp.socketFactory.class","javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory");

        Authenticator auth = new SMTPAuthenticator();
        Session mailSession = Session.getDefaultInstance(props, auth);
        // uncomment for debugging infos to stdout
        // mailSession.setDebug(true);
        Transport transport = mailSession.getTransport();

        MimeMessage message = new MimeMessage(mailSession);

        Multipart multipart = new MimeMultipart("alternative");

        BodyPart part1 = new MimeBodyPart();
        part1.setText("Test");

        BodyPart part2 = new MimeBodyPart();
        part2.setContent("Test", "text/html; charset=\"utf-8\"");

        multipart.addBodyPart(part1);
        multipart.addBodyPart(part2);
        message.setHeader("Content-Type","text/html; charset=\"utf-8\""); 
        message.setContent(multipart,"text/alternative");
        message.setHeader("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "8bit");
        message.setFrom(new InternetAddress("EMAILFROM@EXAMPLE.COM"));
        message.setSubject("E desde java ;)");
        message.addRecipient(Message.RecipientType.TO,new InternetAddress("EMAIL_TO1@EXAMPLE.COM"));
        //message.addRecipient(Message.RecipientType.CC, new InternetAddress("EMAIL_TO2@EXAMPLE.COM"));
        transport.connect();
        transport.sendMessage(message,
            message.getRecipients(Message.RecipientType.TO));
        transport.close();
    }

    private class SMTPAuthenticator extends javax.mail.Authenticator {
        public PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
           String username = SMTP_AUTH_USER;
           String password = SMTP_AUTH_PWD;
           return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password);
        }
    }
}

Configuration example in PHP

To send emails through our SMTP server using the PHP programming language you can do so by following this example. Remember to replace LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL and PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL with the ones that correspond in your case.

 require_once 'class.phpmailer.php';
     require_once 'class.smtp.php';
     $mail = new PHPMailer();

     // Clear all values that can be set
     $mail->ClearAddresses();
     $mail->ClearAllRecipients();
     $mail->ClearAttachments();
     $mail->ClearBCCs();
     $mail->ClearCCs();
     $mail->ClearCustomHeaders();
     $mail->ClearReplyTos();

     // SMTP Data
     $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
     $mail->IsSMTP();
     $mail->Host = 'smtp.acumbamail.com';
     $mail->Username = 'LOGIN_ACUMBAMAIL';
     $mail->Password = 'PASSWORD_ACUMBAMAIL';
     $mail->From     = 'example@mailfrom.com'
     $mail->FromName = 'Example from name';
     $mail->AddReplyTo('example@mailfrom.com');
     $mail->AddAddress('example@mailto.com');
     $mail->Subject  = G_General::convertCharset("Subject", $charset);
     $mail->CharSet  = strtolower($charset);

     if ($html) {
         $mail->MsgHTML(G_General::convertCharset('Body', $charset));
         $mail->AltBody = '';
     } else {
          //$mail->ContentType = 'text/plain';
          $mail->IsHTML(false); // send as Text
          $mail->Body = strip_tags(G_General::convertCharset('Body', $charset));
     }

     if (isset($data['debug']) && $data['debug']) {
          $mail->SMTPDebug = 2;
          $mail->Debugoutput = 'html';
     }

     if (preg_match('#(,|;)#', $data['to'])) {
          $emails = preg_split('#(,|;)#', $data['to']);
          $res = true;
          foreach ($emails as $k => $email) {
              $email = trim($email);
              $mail->ClearAddresses();
              $mail->AddAddress($data['to']);
              if (!$mail->Send()) {
                  $res = false;
              }
          }
      } 
      else {
          return $mail->Send();
      }

      return $res;

Once you have configured the SMTP sending, we recommend that you create email categories to be able to classify the volume of emails sent and analyze their performance individually. We explain how to do it with examples in different languages in this article.

Activate webhooks for transactional email

From the Webhooks section within SMTP in the side menu, you can configure webhooks for transactional email to synchronize your database with Acumbamail and receive alerts when there are changes. Access the step by step at this link.

Email Sending

Just like with sending newsletters from the Acumbamail interface, you can also use our drag & drop editor for transactional emails to customize more than 260 pre-designed templates to your liking.

The steps to edit your transactional email are as follows:

• Within SMTP, go to the Templates section. By default, the templates you have already edited in the Newsletters section (if you also use this service) will appear. You can either directly edit one already in use, or click the New Template button at the top.

SMTP reports

Once you start sending your transactional emails, all the information will go through us, so you can access detailed real-time statistics from the Reports section within SMTP. Below, we explain what data you can extract from here.

Summary

In this view, you can select the date range to compare your results:

Status of sent emails

• Unopened: subscribers (recipient emails) who have not opened your email.
• Opened: subscribers who have opened your email.
• Hard bounces: emails that failed to deliver because they do not exist (typically due to a typo in the address or the email no longer existing). Once these emails are marked as a hard bounce, they will no longer receive future emails from you automatically.
• Soft bounces: emails that experienced a temporary delivery failure. When a soft bounce occurs, the server will make another (or several) delivery attempts, usually after the rest of the campaign has been sent successfully. An email address marked as a soft bounce in one send does not mean it will always bounce in future sends.
• Complaints: times when the recipient manually marked your email as spam. You will no longer automatically send emails to this address.

You can find more information about email marketing metrics in this article from our blog.

URL Tracking

In this article, you can track all the URLs you’ve included in your transactional emails.

Subscriber Details

From Subscriber Details, you can access a view of the status of each email sent on the selected date. You can filter recipients by status (unopened, opened, hard bounce, soft bounce, complaint, or all), by date, or by category. Additionally, you can download the report by clicking the "Export to CSV" button.