In App Email Simplified with The SendGrid Cordova Plugin

By Mehfuz Hossain and Stephen Forte

SendGrid is industry's largest Email Infrastructure as a Service Provider. It is a cloud based email provider that allows you to send email without having to maintain email servers. It is likely these days that your app sends various event notifications to stir social engagement that brings you organic growth and cloud email providers could be the most affordable and hassle free solution you should consider.

Configuring an SMTP server is difficult and as the email volume your app generates increases, the costs start to skyrocket. Email services like SendGrid is cheap and comes with near 100% availability guarantee.  In this post, I will walk you through the process of setting up in-app email for your hybrid mobile app using the SendGrid Cordova plug available in the Telerik Verified Cordova Marketplace.

To get started, you have to visit the SendGrid web site and set up an account. The next step is to create your account and get your API keys that will be used to send out emails.

Your API key is a combination of your username and password that you selected during sign up process. In order to provide email support in your hybrid app, you need to navigate to Telerik Verified Cordova Plugin Marketplace and either import  to your existing project or click the “Try Plugin in AppBuilder” button below that will create a demo project in your account to start.

Once installed correctly the plugin is accessible from window object and you can literally send email in the following way:

The plugin supports both text and HTML emails. Moving to a more realistic app example, you will send automated welcome email as user completes the signup process:

To achieve this, you can create a more personalized email based on form input and even provide methods to verify account through deep linking support. This can be as simple as shown below:

As you can see providing in-app email support has come a long way  giving users a seamless app experience. The Telerik SendGrid Cordova plugin is easy to configure and gets you up and running in no time.

If you are more interested about deep linking support then I would highly recommend to take a look at the following post:

http://blog.originate.com/blog/2014/04/22/deeplinking-in-ios/